I find terms like “fake news” to be loaded and bias inducing on their face. There are very few hard facts in the news world, and often even when discussing verified truth, the presentation can sway one way or another.

“Who debunks the debunkers?”

Fake news influencing people subliminally isn’t anything new. We used to call it propaganda. I read that it got rebranded as PR a while ago and Wikipedia says that advertising is a closely related activity. They all rely on altering your subconscious feelings and attitudes without you knowing it and there is no expectation of truthfulness as part of the process. When I was growing up I remember the news talking constantly about how mass advertising was transforming our culture

This seems to tie in quite neatly with the psychology literature on priming.

Fake news are very much about selling an optic, and not just falsity. It's about spreading and cementing a way of framing the news but also your political positions with regards to the news.

A bag of words with negative and positive sentiments is shown to a bunch students and the main takeaway is fake news can direct your behaviour?

Were the political students left or right leaning, did they have psychometric profiles of the students?

How is this effect different from priming, and like/unlike priming does it persist?

I'm no psychologist but how does this research shed any light on how 'fake news' affects us when it is starting from hard to define concepts like mis/disinformation and fake news?

If anyone can see the scientific value in this research please elaborate. I ended up having fundamental questions on the research itself rather than what it claims to have illustrated.

I would argue echo chambers and exaggerated correlation of incidents contribute to FAR more behavioral changes than fake news. MSM with propaganda has power to start a multi decade war and occupation of entire countries.

The usual lazy analysis asking that some wise people define what is fit for the proles to read.

Can't even get it's basic facts right:

"The notion that online disinformation can produce real-world changes in behavior gained public attention with the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the data of 87 million Facebook users were secretly harvested and used for political advertising in the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election (Isaak & Hanna, 2018)."

Er, no, Cambridge Analytica weren't involved in Brexit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54457407