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Journal of Behavioral and Social Sciences
2018, Vol. 5, 148–156 ISSN: 2375-8899

When Legend Becomes Fact, Tweet the Legend:

Information and Misinformation in the
Age of Social Media
Deborah A. Eckberg James Densley
Metropolitan State University Metropolitan State University

Katrinna Dexter
Metropolitan State University

For over a hundred years, people have learned the news from journalists.
In recent years, however, news about a wide range of topics from politics
to criminal justice is increasingly disseminated via social media networks.
Some see this change as positive, arguing that it facilitates citizen journal-
ism and gives voice to the voiceless. Others, however, predict that we are
heading down a path of misinformation, where news is filtered through
private corporations such as Google and Facebook, and the news we see
is shaped by algorithms that tailor to our personal preferences. This com-
mentary considers both sides of this important debate from a sociological
perspective to promote a sociological research agenda. We used the social
media site Twitter as our primary case study.

Inewspaperman
n The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when a
refuses to publish the true story
of a celebrated face-off, he explains, “When the
legend becomes fact…print the legend” (Gold-
beck & Ford, 1962). Throughout history, peo-
ple have generally been more comfortable with
treasured legends than with hard facts. It seems
that societies have a way of creating myths that
somehow become unquestionable realities.
Deborah A. Eckberg, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of
Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul,
Minnesota.
James Densley, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Crim-
inal Justice at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul,
Minnesota.
Katrinna Dexter, M.S., is a Graduate Research Assis-
tant in Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University in
St. Paul, Minnesota.
Correspondence regarding this article should be sent
to deborah.eckberg@metrostate.edu.
Discerning fact from fiction has thus been a fac-
et of human life since storytelling began. The
difference today is the means by which we ob-
tain our information.
Throughout the 20th century, print, radio-
and television journalists were the truth-tellers
and mythmakers. News executives served as
gatekeepers, deciding which stories were giv-
en the most attention. Today, however, 62%
of Americans garner their news from social
media, and 18% do so frequently (Gottfried &
Shearer, 2016). While some of this news is in-
tentionally sourced from mainstream media, it
is increasingly obtained within the social net-
work of ordinary citizens, mostly by chance
when they are online doing other things (Gott-
fried & Shearer, 2016). Some argue that social
media and peer-to-peer technologies have “de-
mocratized” the news (Ingram, 2016), mak-
ing it possible for previously unheard voices
 Tweet the Legend
to push through the bottleneck that previously
controlled what was distributed. The new “cit-
izen journalism” allows We the People to col-
lect, report, analyze, and disseminate news and
information (Flew, 2005). Armed with smart-
phones and live streams, ordinary people both
break news and make news—from the 2010 Hai-
ti earthquake to Egypt’s Tahrir Square and from
the Syrian Civil War to the 2014 Ferguson un-
rest. From this perspective, the people drive the
discussion. They witness events unfold in real
time and it could, therefore, be said that they
print fact, not legend.
However, others say that this first-person
immediacy has resulted in the opposite effect
and predict the coming of a new “age of misin-
formation” (Zollo et al., 2015), with news that is
unregulated, impulsive, subjective, and in short
form and sound bites of 140 characters or few-
er. Such critics complain that this type of news
means that We the People see only what we
want to see as the news is filtered through gi-
ant, privately-held corporations such as Google
and Facebook that use sophisticated algorithms
to sort audiences by the most specific criteria.
News is shaped by “friends” and “followers”
whom we “like,” ultimately becoming the same
news with the same slant.
Debate about the pros and cons of this new
media landscape reached fever pitch in 2016
with the proliferation of “fake news” websites
that used social media to drive traffic, rather
than real news designed to inform or even satir-
ical news designed to entertain. These websites
gave fraudulent news designed to deceive and,
consequently, to generate online advertising
revenue. Last year, “alternative facts” and con-
spiracy theories, spread in part by a Russian pro-
paganda effort (Timberg, 2016), swayed public
opinion and impacted elections the world over
(Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), prompting Time
magazine to ask, “Is Truth Dead?” (Pine, 2017).
Fake news played such an important role in the
U.K. Brexit referendum and U.S. Presidential
campaign that “post-truth,” an old concept ref-
erencing politics framed by appeals to emotion
over the details of policy, was chosen as Oxford
Dictionary’s (2016) word of the year.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama
warned that fake news threatens the democratic
process that is predicated on informed citizens
(Obama, 2016). It is clear that the shifting in-
formation context has become “too important to
149
ignore” (Rajan, 2017), especially for social sci-
entists and yet, ironically, surprisingly little has
been written about this beyond mainstream me-
dia sources. In the present article, we attempt
to bring scholarly attention and a sociological
perspective to the issue with the following four
aims: (1) to review the existing literature on in-
formation and misinformation in the 21st centu-
ry through the lens of sociology, (2) to begin to
explore theoretical explanations such as cogni-
tive dissonance and social judgement theory as
they relate to this topic, (3) to promote a soci-
ological research agenda related to the dissem-
ination of misinformation, and (4) to encour-
age sociologists to develop methods to study
how social media shapes our understanding of
the social world. We used the social media site
Twitter as our primary case study.
What is Twitter?
Twitter emerged in the mid-2000s as a plat-
form to facilitate a rapid dissemination of in-
formation about major events such as the 2008
California wildfires, the 2008 U.S. Presidential
election, terrorist attacks, and other significant
newsworthy incidents (Hermida, 2010). Log-
ging into Twitter, the user is immediately asked:
“What’s happening?” as a prompt to share in-
formation (Broersma & Graham, 2012). This
is reminiscent of Facebook’s: “What’s on your
mind?” that is used to prompt users to provide
a status update. However, the latter implies a
request for feelings or opinions, whereas the
former implies a request for facts. Twitter us-
ers, therefore, are encouraged to share what is
news, or at least news that is relevant to them
at the time, in 140 characters or fewer. Twit-
ter has “broken” news stories (Diakopoulos, De
Choudhury, & Naaman, 2012; Lee & Ma, 2011),
but has also facilitated self-promotion among
celebrities and politicians (Broersma & Graham,
2012). It was Twitter too that introduced the
ubiquitous hashtag (#) so that others tweeting
about the same event might share virtual space
more easily. The hashtag has since become so
popular that hardly a tweet or a Facebook post
ends without one, and the purpose has changed
from a means of archiving or grouping ideas to
a trendy way of expressing a thought.
How Representative is Twitter?
Twitter has become an important place
where issues of the day are publicly considered
150 Eckberg et al.
and reconsidered. More and more Twitter stud-
ies are being published in academic journals
(e.g., Takhteyev, Gruzd, & Wellman, 2012).
This development is mostly due to the availabil-
ity of data because of the sites open access. In-
creasingly, mainstream media quote Twitter as
a source. Corporations pore over Twitter anal-
yses for insights on “what’s hot” and “what’s
not.” The President of the United States, Don-
ald Trump, practically governs from his Twitter
account, but how representative is it? Does the
consensus which emerges on social media re-
motely reflect consensus among the American
people?
For all its popularity, Twitter is far from pro-
viding a representative sample. First, only 16%
of American adults use Twitter, and only 3%
use it regularly (Pew Research Center, 2012).
Second, people who tweet and retweet tend,
on average, to be younger and more often fe-
male (Beevolve, 2012). They are also more ur-
ban, better educated—better paid, and more
likely to vote democrat (Pew Research Center,
2012). The so-called millennial generation, de-
fined as being almost “permanently online” and
“permanently connected” (Vorderer, Kromer, &
Schneider, 2016), is far more likely than other
age groups to obtain their news from social me-
dia. A recent study conducted by the Media In-
sight Project (2015) found that 88% of millenni-
als gather their news from Facebook, 83% from
YouTube, 50% from Instagram, 36% from Pin-
terest, 33% from Twitter, 23% from Reddit, and
21% from Tumblr. The “sound bite” mentali-
ty, perhaps attributable to the instant gratifica-
tion to which the texting generation of millenni-
als has become accustomed, is likely to blame
for reliance on social media rather than actu-
al news sources. An e-mail newsletter entitled
“The Daily Skimm” (The Skimm, 2017) uses
this need for quick and easy news consumption
as their tagline, touting that they “make it eas-
ier to be smarter.” However, social media also
increases access to information for millennials,
which is a positive consequence.
How Accurate Is Twitter?
Politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick
Moynihan once said: “Everyone is entitled to
his own opinion, but not to his own facts” (as
cited in Weisman, 2010, p. 2). Intentionally or
not, mainstream media sometimes make errors,
and news not yet “fit to print” is sometimes
printed anyway. For example, in 1948 the Chi-
cago Daily Tribune famously printed the erro-
neous “Dewey Defeats Truman” banner head-
line on their front page. More recently, there
was the inaccurate, and at times irresponsible,
reporting of the 2013 Boston Marathon bomb-
ing in the New York Post, which identified the
wrong suspects on its front page. CNN did no
better when they mistakenly reported that a
suspect had been arrested (Shih, 2013). The
adage, “If it bleeds, it leads,” the phrase first
coined by Pooley (1989) writing for New York
Magazine, further captures the idea that main-
stream media are disproportionately focused
on sensational stories that keep viewers more
amused and entertained than informed (Post-
man, 1985). It is within this context that some
self-important journalists have become “mor-
al entrepreneurs” (Cohen, 1972), fueling fear
and fascination about AIDS, crack babies, ju-
venile “super-predators,” and a whole host of
mythical creatures (Glassner, 2000). They also
continue to report incomplete aspects of scien-
tific studies or misinterpret findings and high-
light unusual claims. When it comes to climate
change or evolution, for example, they even use
the journalistic norm of “fair and balanced” to
teach a controversy that does not exist (Oreskes
& Conway, 2010).
When mainstream media speculate without
facts, however, there is editorial accountabili-
ty and clear mechanisms to correct or retract.
This practice is not the case with social media,
and, consequently, there are countless examples
of “what Twitter got wrong” (Reinwald, 2014).
Reports of a 2011 shooting in London, England,
for example, caused mass hysteria, simply be-
cause two coincidental events—a police train-
ing exercise mistaken for the real thing and a
film crew “shooting” a television commercial—
were conflated (Prigg & Davenport, 2011). More
recently, social media added to panic over false
reports of gunfire at New York’s JFK airport, re-
sulting in a “human stampede” (Wilson & Gold-
stein, 2016). Indeed, there have been times
when Twitter prematurely “killed” living celeb-
rities (Ramisetti, 2016) or tried innocent people
in the court of public opinion.
Part of the challenge is that death hoax-
es and false news “go viral” regardless of the
credibility of the sender. The authors of infor-
mation disseminated via social media have no
 Tweet the Legend
special training or expertise; they are the gener-
al public. This reality is an advantage in some
cases. On Twitter, for example, anyone with
an account can tweet virtually anything, fol-
low anyone, and be followed by as many peo-
ple as have internet access. However, at the
same time, open access raises a number of con-
cerns about both the veracity of the information
being disseminated and the methods by which
such dissemination occurs. For example, there
are tens of thousands of fake accounts lying
dormant on Twitter and being run remotely by
bots (i.e., a software application that runs auto-
mated tasks) that fake follower numbers, send
spam messages, and boost interest in trending
topics (Echeverría & Zhou, 2017).
Back in the real world, misinformation can
often go viral due, in part, to what has been
labeled by Schildkraut and Muschert (2014)
as “disaster narratives.” The term refers to the
marathon of news coverage that typically fol-
lows an exceptionally tragic event, such as the
mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Such marathon coverage has a lasting impact
on how society conceptualizes mass violence,
which often results in emotionally affected peo-
ple sharing their thoughts about the incident on
social media (Schildkraut & Muschert, 2004).
People feel the need to react publicly, or at least
to their Twitter followers and Facebook friends.
Such sharing of feelings about events can be ca-
thartic, but problems arise when the original
story is unverified, or worse, completely fabri-
cated. Fake news can motivate real violence,
such as the assault on a Washington, D.C. piz-
zeria alleged to be harboring a Satanic, child
sex-abuse cabal led by liberal politicians (Kang
& Goldman, 2016).
Birds of a Feather
As of June 2016, Twitter had 313 million
monthly active users (Twitter, 2016). Without
Twitter, there is no doubt that many of these 313
million voices would never have been heard.
However, there is a qualitative difference be-
tween increasing public discourse and elevat-
ing public discourse, which is directly related
to Twitter’s self-selection bias. A Twitter user is
more likely, simply by virtue of a penchant for
tweeting, to be a certain type of person. Pre-
cisely what type of person remains an impor-
tant question for future research, but every col-
lege professor reading this knows the action is
151
at the margins; some students “love teacher,”
others “hate teacher,” and they will make that
known on their course evaluations. Most peo-
ple, however, do not care enough to complete
the evaluation form in the first place. We sus-
pect something similar occurs online, which
may be referred to as a “grievance bias” or a
“compliance bias.” The digitally motivated are
precisely that—motivated. Social media is reac-
tive; people take to it to voice their support or
opposition to something, not to stay silent.
Some people would be better served by
talking less and listening more. Lest we forget,
behind every fake news story lie internet bul-
lies and “trolls” (Bishop, 2013) who routinely
abuse, harass, and promote hate online (Gold-
berg, 2016). Further, unless someone has a
huge following, or one of their tweets takes hold
and goes viral, they are mostly preaching to the
choir. One of the most basic notions govern-
ing the structure of social networks, including
those online, is homophily, i.e., the formation
of social ties due to matching individual traits,
such as age or race (for a review, see McPher-
son, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). Captured by
the adage, “birds of a feather flock together,”
homophily means that Facebook friends tend to
look like each other and think like each other
(Dunbar, Arnaboldi, Conti, & Passarella, 2015).
People also tend to follow people they like,
making their timeline a reflection of their own
views rather than the views of others. A recent
study found that if a teenager saw a picture on
social media with lots of likes, they tended to
like it themselves (Sherman, Payton, Hernan-
dez, Greenfield, & Dapretto, 2016). If another
teen saw the same picture with only a few likes,
they tended not to like it, suggesting the Mat-
thew Effect (or accumulated advantage) is alive
and well on Twitter (Merton, 1968). This ef-
fect has led some to characterize social media
as an “echo chamber” providing reaffirmation
and shielding people from disagreement (Quat-
trociocchi, Scala, & Sunstein, 2016).
Potential Theoretical Explanations
Further contributing to the Twitter echo
chamber is what psychologists refer to as “con-
firmation bias”, or the tendency to highlight
evidence which confirms what we already be-
lieve. In a classic study, Lord, Ross, and Lepper
(1979) asked people to read a series of studies
that seemed to either support or reject the idea
152
that capital punishment deters crime. They
found that people accepted data that support-
ed their initial beliefs, but rejected information
that opposed them, thus leaving participants
even more convinced of their opinions and even
more polarized. This explains, in part, how fake
news lives on after it is refuted. Indeed, trying
to correct misperceptions can actually reinforce
them, according to Nyhan and Reifler (2010).
These researchers document what they call a
“backfire effect,” whereby individuals hold
fast to their perceptions, whether real or faulty,
even when presented with evidence to the con-
trary and, in fact, become increasingly intransi-
gent the more they are presented with such evi-
dence. The lack of agreement over what is real
and what is fake contributes to our perceptions
of in-group heterogeneity and out-group ho-
mogeneity (Savistky, Coen, Ruebel, & Eibach,
2016) or the long-standing social psychological
concept that those who do not agree with us are
all the same (Goethels & Nelson, 1973).
One theoretical explanation for a confirma-
tion bias and the backfire effect is what psy-
chologist Festinger (1957) termed cognitive dis-
sonance, i.e., the dissonance that arises when
facts counter your beliefs. Underlying cognitive
dissonance is the fact the people have invested
in a particular position (e.g., a political party, re-
ligious belief, or economic ideology) to such an
extent that any evidence to suggest they invest-
ed in the wrong position threatens their very
identity. When people hold inconsistent be-
liefs, cognitive dissonance suggests that they al-
most always side with what is most comfortable
instead of what is true in order to alleviate the
arising tension (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter,
1956). In this way, fake news and conspira-
cy theories live on. Another related theoretical
explanation is social judgement (Sherif & Hov-
land, 1961), which holds that when people re-
ceive messages, in our case via social media,
they immediately decide whether they accept,
reject, or remain uncommitted to them by com-
paring them with currently held views.
Seeing is not Believing
When fake news enters into the public are-
na, it is often amplified. The facts become lost
in the shuffle of competing information, limit-
ed attention, or both. In part, this obscuring is
because there is no single source that can send
a correction for a mistake. Were one to follow
Eckberg et al.
the Twitter path of information about a particu-
lar incident, real or fake, he or she would like-
ly see that, once the incident occurs, those who
claim to be eyewitnesses immediately tweet
what they see, occasionally including pictures
or video taken with a cell phone. Those who
follow these supposed eyewitnesses retweet the
stories accordingly, and those who follow them
retweet, and so on. Thus, while the original
eyewitness accounts may differ from person to
person, any nugget of information regarded by
one Twitter follower as the truth can go viral in
a matter of minutes, often moving further and
further away from the facts of the original inci-
dent with each retweet. As unverified facts are
retweeted, the level of inaccuracy regarding the
initial story grows. In short, the way misinfor-
mation is disseminated via social media can be
described as a giant virtual game of telephone
operator.
In the real-life game of telephone operator,
one must ask who initiates the news story and
how do they gain uncritical acceptance of their
accounts? On social media, news often comes
directly from the scene from those who are
there on the ground and capturing video foot-
age in real time with their smartphones. They
are social media’s eyewitnesses, and their news
comes with their perspective. The people who
see their tweets and posts immediately retweet
and re-post without considering the source. In-
stead, people regard their proximity to the event
as evidence of the veracity of their comments.
The problem, however, is that eyewitness testi-
mony has a long and storied history of inaccu-
racy (Alper, Buckhout, Chern, Harwood, & Slo-
movits, 1976; Davis & Loftus, 2012; List, 1986;
Thompson-Cannino, Cotton, & Torneo, 2009;
Yullie & Cutshall, 1986). In a particularly dev-
astating example, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino,
under pressure from law enforcement to identi-
fy her rapist, mistakenly picked Ronald Cotton
out of a lineup. This choice led to a conviction
which resulted in Cotton spending eleven years
in prison until a DNA test proved his innocence
(Thompson-Cannino, et. al., 2009).
Why, then, do consumers of social media
readily accept the accounts of eyewitnesses?
Why do they bestow authority upon them and,
in one of the most typical errors in reasoning
(see Bachman & Schutt, 2014), accept this au-
thority uncritically and reject opportunities to
 Tweet the Legend
evaluate the information presented in a critical
manner? Why do they not verify whether or not
the source is an informed one? Is an insatiable
appetite for immediate information to blame or
is it a tendency to take the path of least resis-
tance and defer to those who know, whether or
not we can verify that they indeed knew in the
first place? Either way, researchers suggest that
people are becoming less adept at separating
fact from fiction. A recent study found middle
school, high school, and college students were
easily duped by fake news and lacked the skills
necessary to check the veracity of claims pre-
sented in tweets, comments, and articles online
(Stanford History Education Group, 2016, p. 4).
This study is troubling when one considers that
social media has the power to transmit false in-
formation to millions in mere minutes; the more
players of telephone operator, the more likely it
is that the information will be distorted.
On Twitter, the hashtag is often a way for
reporters to promote a sense of live coverage,
as every post that ends with a hashtag can add
to the developing news story as it unfolds (Bro-
ersma & Graham, 2012). Here is where social
media and mainstream media intersect. Profes-
sional journalists can access tweets and threads
from hashtags posted by amateur colleagues as
a “collective intelligence” and “wisdom of the
crowd” (Broersma & Graham, 2012). With less
time and money to produce the news, news cor-
porations now follow what is trending on so-
cial media, thus trading original reporting of the
news, which is expensive, for cheap and easy
“commentary on the news interspersed with
broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential
news conferences” (Kaiser, 2014, para. 4). Crit-
ics argue that this has turned many newsrooms
into “copy factories,” whereby the same news is
recycled over and over again (Lewis, Williams,
& Franklin, 2008, p. 40). This type of ambi-
ent journalism (Hermida, 2010), while broad-
ly disseminated beyond traditional networks
(Diakoupoulos et al., 2012) and increasingly
responsive to the evolving news landscape, is
sometimes more interested in “getting it first
than getting it right” (Lee & Ma, 2011).
Conclusion
From the fraudulent and unethical “yellow
journalism” of William Randolph Hearst and Jo-
seph Pulitzer that was partially responsible for
the outset of the Spanish-American War (Woolf,
153
2006), to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, a
1938 Halloween hoax about a Martian inva-
sion on Earth that created a nationwide panic,
fake news has been a fixture of the American
landscape for decades (Schwartz, 2015). Once
constrained to the pages of the The National
Enquirer and other tabloids, deliberately mis-
leading and false stories masquerading as real
news are making a resurgence thanks largely
to the openness of social media and the finan-
cial incentives (i.e., advertising revenue) tied to
website views and likes. On social media, peo-
ple miles away in Russia or Macedonia can cre-
ate false propaganda, prosper while it goes vi-
ral, deny all responsibility once it is debunked,
and then use complex algorithms to cover their
tracks (Kirby, 2016).
Having reviewed the existing literature on
information and misinformation and explored
some theoretical explanations, we now turn to
our final two aims—promoting a sociological
research agenda related to this subject and en-
couraging sociologists to develop methods for
studying how social media shapes our under-
standing of the social world. First, social sci-
entists must be careful not to be too pessimis-
tic in their appraisal of the state of social media.
A recent study calculated that for fake news
to have changed the outcome of the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election, a single fake article would
need to have had the same persuasive effect as
36 television campaign ads (Allcott & Gentz-
kow, 2017). In other words, the threat of fake
news is likely overstated. A recent experiment
also found that pre-emptively exposing people
to a small “dose” of misinformation can help
“inoculate” them against further bogus claims
(Van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Rosenthal, & Mai-
bach, 2017).
Where social scientists can help is in evalu-
ating the steps being taken to address some of
the challenges that the current media landscape
presents. In late 2016, for example, Google
and Facebook banned fake sites from using
online advertising, and Facebook launched a
partnership with fact-checking websites such
as Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact.
com to flag spurious news and hoaxes (Hern,
2016). Google similarly tags fake news stories
in search results, and Facebook provides links
to advice on how to spot fake news and report it
(Thomas, 2017). Many mainstream media sites
154 Eckberg et al.
are also posting advice and guidance about fake
news, drawing on the same logic social scien-
tists use when differentiating science from pseu-
doscience (Willingham, 2016). Whether these
strategies change outcomes is an open question
for sociologists to answer.
As educators, it is the responsibility of soci-
ology professors not only to practice media lit-
eracy, but also to encourage it among their stu-
dents (e.g., Vraga & Tully, 2016). Just as we
have always taught our students to be critical
consumers of research, whether it be report-
ed in peer-reviewed journals or local newspa-
pers, we must now expand that admonition to
include critical consumption of what they read
on social media. Even more importantly, we
must encourage students to “think before they
tweet” lest they propagate the dissemination of
fake news themselves. Young people must be
made aware of their information environments
and understand that every storyteller, on every
platform, has a bias.
Fake news is old news and is as old as any
agenda. However, thanks to social media, we
are witnessing a new distillation or refinement.
For this reason, fake news has become a subject
worth understanding in its own right. There re-
main significant difficulties in doing this well,
among which is the fact that traditional sociol-
ogists lack the technical skills to examine news
online. Although social media is based with-
in a computerized technical world, it has impli-
cations and ramifications that affect significant-
ly more than a cell phone or computer screen.
Only by collaborating with computer scientists
and others will sociologists be able to appre-
ciate fully the evolving role of social media in
society.
Social media is no longer a personal or in-
dividual experience limited to those who you
know and have added to your network. Now,
you may tweet your experience or record an
event which in turn may go viral. Within min-
utes, that same tweet or video has the poten-
tial to be picked up by national media sources
and used as evidence in a larger story. When
connections and inferences can be made in
mere seconds, repercussions and consequenc-
es can be made with equal speed. In a fast-
paced world full of people hungry for the next
big story, researchers must be prepared for the
impact social media will have on society. More-
over, sociologists have to carry the torch of both
conducting and disseminating research that fur-
thers the understanding, progression, and impli-
cations of social media on individuals, groups,
and societal behavior.
References
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and
fake news in the 2016 election. National Bureau
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tmp/61920-w23089.pdf
Alper, A., Buckhout, R., Chern, S., Harwood, R., & Sl-
movits, M. (1976). Eyewitness identification: Ac-
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