The paper addresses the issue of “fake news” through a well-known and
widely studied experiment that illustrates a possible science behind the
phenomenon. Public news is viewed as an aggregation of decentralized
pieces of valuable information about complex events. Such systems rely
on accumulated investment in trust in news sources. In the case of fake
news, news source reliability is not known. The experiment demonstrates
how fake news can destroy both the investment in trust and also the
benefits that news provides.