Economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, who have studied these phenomena in detail, define “fake news” as “distorted signals uncorrelated with the truth” that impose “private and social costs by making it more difficult… to infer the true state of the world.…” They found that in the lead-up to the 2016 US election there were 760 million instances of a user reading these intentionally orchestrated lies online, or about three such stories for each adult American.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1611