Fake News and Advertising on Social Media: A Study of the Anti-Vaccination Movement

Lesley Chiou and Catherine Tucker

No 25223, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Online sources sometimes publish information that is false or intentionally misleading. We study the role of social networks and advertising on social networks in the dissemination of false news stories about childhood vaccines. We document that anti-vaccine Facebook groups disseminate false stories beyond the groups as well as serving as an “echo” chamber. We also find that after Facebook's ban on advertising by fake new sites, the sharing of fake news articles on Facebook fell by 75% on Facebook compared to Twitter.

JEL-codes: L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict, nep-net, nep-pay and nep-soc
Note: PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25223.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25223

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25223

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().