Fake news and beliefs: evidence from a natural experiment

Can fake news affect individual beliefs? We exploit the natural experiment of ‘the night of collective panic' in Bogotá, combining administrative data from emergency calls, tweets, and elicited beliefs, to answer this question. The outcome variables are the perceived levels of insecurity within the neighbourhood. We fail to reject the hypothesis that the perception of insecurity was unaffected. We cannot exclude that the sample's demographic characteristics drive the null result.