Andrea Prat on How Many Fear Fake News and ‘Parallel Universes’ Threaten Democracy

The speed and intensity at which misinformation spreads indicates a growing difficulty in discerning truth, argues Columbia Business School Professor Andrea Prat, who is a member of the Center for Political Economy's Advisory Board.

Prat's article — Many Fear Fake News and ‘Parallel Universes’ Threaten Democracy. The Reality of News Perception Is More Complex — was published before the election on the website of Columbia Business School.

"To grasp voters’ knowledge and how it varies over the election cycle," Prat wrote, "Columbia Business School researchers worked with colleagues at MIT Sloan and Northwestern University to build a map of voters’ news knowledge, examining where it exists and how it fluctuates. The goal was to see if the “death of truth” phenomenon is real and, if so, to quantify it."