NASA runs a child-slave colony on Mars! Photos taken by a Chinese orbiter reveal an alien settlement on the moon! Shape-shifting reptilian extraterrestrials that can control human minds are running the U.S. government! What drives the astonishing popularity of such stories? Are we a particularly gullible species? Perhaps not—maybe we’re just overwhelmed. A bare-bones model of how news spreads on social media, published in June in Nature Human Behavior, indicates that just about anything can go viral. Even in a perfect world, where everyone wants to share real news and is capable of evaluating the veracity of every claim, some fake news would still reach thousands (or even millions) of people, simply because of information overload.
