"By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people,"<p>They're comparing average views per factual tweet vs. average views per fake tweet. The problem with this approach is that a huge number of rarely-read factual tweets brings down the average.<p>To illustrate: consider a world where 90% of the people are sensible and only read factual articles, while 10% of the people are fools who read fake clickbait. Suppose 99% of tweets are factual, and 1% are fake. You would get the same result: average views per fake article are higher than average views per factual article. And yet, in this world 90% of people read only factual articles. So the statistic may not mean what it seems to suggest.<p>In real life, the long tail of factual articles is much larger than the long tail of fake articles. There are zillions of factual articles about product releases, or city council resolutions, or criminal convictions, or CEO replacements. So I don't think you can conclude from the study that most news being read is fake.