Most Americans Believe Fake News Headlines

The issue of fake news has been making real news headlines for weeks. Just yesterday, Hillary Clinton alluded to "Pizzagate" and called for action against the "epidemic" of fake news, warning it can have "real world consequences". Earlier this week, Ipsos and Buzzfeed News released a report, finding that fake headlines fool American adults 75 percent of the time.

Chris Jackson of Ipsos Public Affairs pointed out that "the 2016 election may mark the point in modern political history when information and disinformation became a dominant electoral currency". The scale of the problem can be seen on the following infographic which shows a random selection of real and bogus news headlines with reasonable levels of awareness from the past few weeks.

Even though authentic news headlines have a higher accuracy perception, their fake news counterparts manage to fool sizeable majorities of American adults. When a false story about Trump sending his plane to transport stranded U.S. Marines did the rounds, 84 percent of people believed the headlines was very or somewhat accurate.