A large number of Twitter users get their news from the platform. However, getting one’s news from Twitter is risky because fake news spreads rapidly on the platform and reaches a wide audience. Technology plays an important role in fake news’ dominance: online advertising services like Google AdSense incentivize the production of fake news and automated accounts--or bots--play an important role in helping it go viral. The sheer amount of fake news on Twitter influences our beliefs, making it difficult to form true beliefs about the world while scrolling through our Twitter feeds. Nevertheless, Twitter seems reluctant to take meaningful action against fake news, despite the fact that some algorithmic solutions have proven successful. Although Twitter seems ambivalent towards the problem, users can change the way they use the platform to reduce fake news’ potency.

This paper was presented at the Western States Communication Association Undergraduate Scholars Conference in 2019.