Silverman used a tool called BuzzSumo to find the highest-performing legitimate news articles — stories from sites like the New York Times and the Huffington Post — and then compared them with high-performing stories that peddled false claims like “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” (he didn’t) and “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment in murder-suicide” (this didn’t happen).
Silverman then compared the Facebook engagement — the number of shares, reactions, and comments — for the top 20 legitimate news stories against the top 20 fake news stories for three three-month periods. As you can see, the legitimate news stories outperformed the fake ones in the early months of the 2016 election campaign. But in the last three months, fake news sources saw their engagement surge.