New frontiers for fake news research on social media in 2021 and beyond

In the past five years, the research community made impressive strides in quantifying the dissemination and reach of fake news, understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying belief in falsehoods and failure to correct it, and developing new methods for limiting its spread. Yet, there are many open challenges that must be addressed to ensure the integrity of the democratic process and the health of our online information ecosystem. In this talk, I focus on areas of research that are critical for advancing our understanding of fake news on social media: going beyond representative samples and convenience samples, detecting emerging fake news sources and developing new kinds of benchmark datasets for its detection, studying cross-platform impacts of platform interventions and delivering more ecologically valid experiments on social media. Progress on these fronts is necessary in order to study the pockets of society that are most heavily hit by fake news, to limit its impact, and to devise mitigations.