If Financial Times readers were asked whether they could tell the difference between “fake” and “true” news, most would reply with an indignant “yes”.

Digital researchers at New York University and Stanford have recently examined this question in a more rigorous way, with some unnerving results. Every day, over a period of several months, they selected five news items that had been published in the past 24 hours and asked different groups of 90 people across the US to ascertain whether or not they were true. 

They also asked professional fact-checkers to check the same stories to provide some “ground truth” as to their veracity, as Joshua Tucker, a politics professor and co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, explained at a recent conference held at the Facebook campus.