Fighting fake news: a role for computational social science in the fight against digital misinformation

Abstract

The massive, uncontrolled, and oftentimes systematic spread of inaccurate and misleading information on the Web and social media poses a major risk to society. Digital misinformation thrives on an assortment of cognitive, social, and algorithmic biases and current countermeasures based on journalistic corrections do not seem to scale up. By their very nature, computational social scientists could play a twofold role in the fight against fake news: first, they could elucidate the fundamental mechanisms that make us vulnerable to misinformation online and second, they could devise effective strategies to counteract misinformation.