A few years back, you discovered what you consider to be the scariest scientific result you have ever encountered. What did you find?
My team and I were studying Twitter and all of the verified true and false news stories that had spread on the platform over a decade, from its inception in 2006 to 2017. The scary finding was that false news travelled farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied — sometimes by an order of magnitude. That is what led me to focus my research on what I call the Hype Machine.
How do you define the Hype Machine—and why is it more relevant now than ever?
The Hype Machine is the social media industrial complex, which consists of all the various platforms — from to , , , and so on — along with the third-party companies that support this ecosystem. I call it the Hype Machine because it is designed to hype us up
