This scenario is what prompted Mike Caulfield, the director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, to dig into the question of “whether fake news or real news is more viral.” As Caulfield explained in a blog post published November 13, he looked at Facebook’s own publicly available social news tracking API to study several news stories — from real news websites as well as fake websites attempting to pass themselves off as real news websites — in hopes of determining which ones users were more likely to share.

New Directions in Open Education