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Everyone, even our new president, seems to be talking about \u201cfake news\u201d \u2014 just look at how Google searches have spiked<\/a> over the past few months. But what does fake news actually mean?<\/p>\n On one level, the term seems pretty self-explanatory. Fake news is a story that\u2019s completely false, usually invented for traffic and ad revenue, or to advance a political agenda \u2014 or both.<\/p>\n News hoaxes aren\u2019t new, but there\u2019s a growing sense that social media, particularly Facebook, has made it easier for these stories to spread, and for fake news to become a viable business model. (Who\u2019s actually publishing\u00a0these stories? Well, their exact identity is still a bit mysterious<\/a>.)<\/p>\n For example, a study by BuzzSumo <\/a>found that the biggest fake news story of 2016, about then-President Barack Obama supposedly banning the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, received more than 2 million Facebook shares, comments and reactions.\u00a0Other popular stories \u00a0\u2014 including one suggesting that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump and another that Trump was offering free one-way tickets to Africa and Mexico \u2014 also got\u00a0hundreds of thousands of shares, comments and reactions.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve even\u00a0seen arguments that Facebook contributed to the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump by facilitating the spread of fake news. In response, the social network has rolled out new features<\/a> aimed at making it easier for users to flag and remove fake stories.<\/p>\n To be clear, economists Matthew Grentzkow of Stanford University and Hunt Allcott of New York University have done research showing that social media had\u00a0a smaller\u00a0influence on the election<\/a>\u00a0than you might think, with TV still playing a much larger role.<\/p>\n Still, fake news can have real consequences: As a result of the \u201cPizzagate\u201d rumor supposedly tying Hillary Clinton to a child sex ring at the\u00a0Washington, D.C. restaurant Comet Ping Pong, a man actually showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe impact of fake news<\/strong><\/h2>\n