Why It’s Okay to Call It ‘Fake News’

This week, more than a dozen high-profile social scientists and legal scholars charged their profession to help fix democracy by studying the crisis of fake news.

Their call to action, published in Science, was notable for listing all that researchers still do not know about the phenomenon. How common is fake news, how does it work, and what can online platforms do to defang it? “There are surprisingly few scientific answers to these basic questions,” the authors write.

But just as notable as their admission was the language used to make it. I was surprised to find this group of scholars using the term fake news at all—even though they were calling for research into fake news.

That may sound odd. How can you study something and not call it by its name? Yet over the past year, academics and tech companies have increasingly shied away from the phrase. Facebook has pushedAnd some scholars have worried that by using the term, they amplify President Trump’s penchant for