This is an important article because a functioning democracy relies on an informed electorate, as opposed to people acting on rumors and disinformation. Fake news can spread very rapidly on social media but can and should also be challenged on social media; the latter was not possible when print newspapers had a monopoly on the propagation of news. The Hearst and Pulitzer papers published inflammatory anti-Spanish material that helped draw the U.S. into the Spanish-American War (1898) and one-sided coverage of the First World War got us into that one as well. The role of fake news in causing wars shows how dangerous it is. I think some of the conspiracy theorists are watching too many James Bond movies and believing they are real, e.g. the "space laser" was featured in Diamonds Are Forever, and the implantable tracking nanochips mentioned in this article were in Spectre.

The idea of using an R value to treat the propagation of fake news is very innovative and important, because it is an indicator of how rapidly rumors spread.

It's important to fact-check social media stories that seem too outrageous to be true before sharing them, and also to correct misinformation so the original poster can remove or correct the story.