Aisha Sultan: Who is more likely to fall for fake news?

Aisha Sultan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 6, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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We don’t need a study to know that the internet is awash in propaganda, AI slop and outright lies.

But, we are far more susceptible to falling for this kind of information fraud than we may realize. A 2024 study by professor Andrea Prat at Columbia Business School, found that roughly half the population is uncertain about what information is true.

These days I frequently see social media posts or group text messages prefaced with: “Not sure if this is true..” or “Is this real?” And these posts are coming from media-savvy, educated news consumers.

One of my biggest fears a decade ago was about what would happen to our country (and the world) if most people could no longer separate truth from fiction. We’re getting a taste of that now, and it’s worse than I expected.

Even more worrisome than the population’s growing uncertainty about reality is the dangerous overconfidence among some groups about what they believe is true.

Researchers published a 2021 study in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences that looked at the role of overconfidence in news judgment by using two large nationally representative survey samples. They found that three in four Americans overestimate their ability to distinguish between legitimate and false news headlines.

Overconfident individuals are more likely to visit untrustworthy websites, fail to successfully distinguish between true and false claims about current events in survey questions, and to report greater willingness to like or share false content on social media, especially when it is politically aligned with their own beliefs.

“The individuals who are least equipped to identify false news content are also the least aware of their own limitations and, therefore, more susceptible to believing it and spreading it further,” the researchers wrote.

This rings true.

Another meta-analysis published in 2024 in PNAS found that older adults, Democrats (as compared to Republicans), and those with higher analytical thinking skills showed greater discrimination ability. They found that if news content supported a person’s ideological beliefs, people are more willing to uncritically accept these stories as true.

The rise of AI-generated photos, deep fakes and videos is making this problem even worse.

Wired recently detailed how a medical student in India made thousands of dollars duping MAGA fans by using AI to create a blonde, busty pro-Trump influencer named “Emily Hart.”

He sold AI generated photos and videos on a fan site to MAGA supporters while his fake videos got millions of views on Instagram. His reels got up to 5 million views.

“I haven’t seen any easier way to make money online,” he told Wired.

While some on the left may feel a sense of schadenfreude from this story, don’t get too smug. Remember the hoax by actor Jussie Smollett? He claimed to have been attacked by men wearing MAGA hats. Most Democrats and liberals immediately believed it. He was later convicted of five counts of felony disorderly conduct for staging the attack.

Studies do consistently find the volume of misinformation is higher on the right side of the political spectrum, but both liberals and conservatives are motivated to believe fake news, and dismiss real news that contradicts their ideologies.

In a more recent example, social media posts went viral that claimed CNN reported that more than 62 million men attended an "online rape academy" where they were taught how to drug to sleep and then sexually assault their wives and partners. The "62 million" figure cited in social media posts, however, represented the total number of visits to the entire pornographic website in February, according to Snopes.

The porn site is home to more than 20,000 videos of so-called "sleep" content uploaded by users, with hundreds of thousands of views. In these videos, men film themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show they are sleeping or sedated, according to CNN.

This is truly horrifying, but it’s not exactly the same thing as 62 million men attending an online rape academy.

Reality is often stranger than fiction, but we still need to know the difference.

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