It might be easy to think that only those on the opposite side of the political fence would be silly enough to fall for fake news, but thanks to how our brain forms memories, chances are we've all done it.
When we hear a message repeated, seeing it on Facebook for example, and then again on a blog or website, we are much more likely to remember it.
This ability to effortlessly remember relevant information is called fluent retrieval.
Once we are fluent, we are more likely to believe that it is true, especially when our echo chamber of social media sources agree with us - when a lie is repeated often enough it starts to feel like it's the truth.
Politics aside, fake news is also festering in science, with false claims being spread about big issues.
You only need to head to an anti-vaccination website to see the hard hitting news-like articles claiming to contain scientific evidence.
Further reading shows many of these articles cite cherry-picked data to strengthen their fear-inducing narrative, rather than give the full picture.
The Hamilton City Council fluoridated water debacle was a recent example in New Zealand where sensationalist claims were presented as informative scientific articles, stating irrelevant facts to increase fear around the use of fluoride in water supplies.
Only this week, the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology tweeted about an article from Breitbart News (a heavily biased right wing news source) commenting "Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists."
Even cursory investigation shows that the Breitbart piece cited the Daily Mail as its source, which in turn cited NASA within its article.
Read the original NASA piece and you find that it actually discusses a new study which found strong evidence that the observed slowdown in surface warming was due to heat being redistributed through the ocean.
NASA's conclusion was that overall, global warming had not slowed - the opposite position to that claimed in the tweet.
To understand the importance of this tweet, we need to realise that the House of Representatives Committee is in charge of non-defence federal scientific research and has jurisdiction over NASA, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation to name just a few.
So, one of the organisations that has the most power over climate change decisions in the US, and perhaps the World, is spreading fake news blaming human caused global warming on El Niño!
The truth is that fake news is as big a problem in science as it is in politics.
Our mainstream media outlets don't deliberately transmit fake political news, yet time and time again I see them transmit fake science news.
As we move away from traditional media and consume more of our news online, where sensationalist headlines create an ideal environment for fake news, we need to ask ourselves who we can really trust to provide us with unbiased, evidence based news?
