Information Processing in the Age of Post-Truth

Fake news has existed since humans started communicating. For instance, in the early stages of literacy, the literate transferred the news to the illiterate population by framing it subjectively.  Similarly, today partisan cable outlets often baselessly discredit political opponents.  However, due to social media, the media has become more fragmented and extensive than ever.  For instance, fake news became so popular in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections that the Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” as the term of the year. The creation, spread, and influence of fake news creation must be widely understood and tackled because fake news is very prominent and plays a significant role in exacerbating separatism by affecting partisans’ thinking. Although bot activities lead users to be stuck in echo chambers, human behaviour is more responsible for spreading fake news because fake news targets people’s biases and activates their emotions. Hence, the argument in this article is that fake news spreads through echo-chambers by exploiting people’s emotions and biases and people should protect themselves by getting educated on critical evaluation of the news with an emphasis on cognitive biases, media literacy, and analytical processing (e.g., Bayes’ theorem) from young ages