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Donald Trump has begun casting all unfavorable news coverage as fake news. In one tweet, he even went so far as to say that "any negative polls are fake news." And many of his supporters have picked up and run with his new definition. The ability to reshape language - even a little - is an awesome power to have. According to language experts on both sides of the aisle, the rebranding of fake news could be a genuine threat to democracy.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study produced by MIT and published Thursday in Science. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. "It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information," said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. "And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature."

Providing new details about how it's trying to counter the spread of fake news on its services, Facebook says it's working with fact-checking groups to identify bogus stories - and to warn users if a story they're trying to share has been reported as fake.

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. And refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

How to sort genuine from fake online news? Experts suggest these tips to become a more savvy media reader: 1. Pay attention to the domain and URL 2. Read the "About Us" section 3. Look at the quotes in a story--or the lack thereof 4. Look at who said them 5. Check the comments 6. Reverse image search

Students are unable to tell if a paid article was whether real or not. This caused students to accept what they read in front of them as fact without actual legitimate information.

Closing your eyes when trying to recall events increases the chances of accuracy, researchers at the University of Surrey suggest. Scientists tested people's ability to remember details of films showing fake crime scenes. They hope the studies will help witnesses recall details more accurately when questioned by police.

An NPR/Ipsos poll in December found that a significant number of Americans believe disinformation about the coronavirus and about settled historical facts. The findings underscore the enduring nature of unfounded conspiracies at a time when experts say disinformation is being spread on an unprecedented scale. The Internet gives conspiracy theorists a place to connect, and social media gives them a way to quickly disseminate their ideas on a mass scale. Disinformation peddlers are trying to drive traffic to websites where they can make money, or they're trying to shape a political narrative.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high. None of those things are true. But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the "illusory truth effect," a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias. "Repetition makes things seem more plausible," says Lynn Hasher, a psychologist at the University of Toronto whose research team first noticed the effect in the 1970s. "And the effect is likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information."