The past year was a somber one for democracies around the world, as distaste for political institutions and political elites reached a breaking point. Brexit triumphed over common sense, and united defense, in England. Extreme right-wing politicians continued their march to power in continental Europe. And the U.S. Electoral College victory of Donald Trump secured the election of a populist demagogue who openly criticizes the democratic system.

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. So do you remember reading that Hillary Clinton paid Jay Z and Beyonce $62 million dollars for performing at a rally in Cleveland before the election? You might have, but the story is false, one of many posted on hyper-partisan websites and spread by aggressive social media campaigns during the presidential election.

In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF).” David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University’s Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already.

Eric Tucker, a 35-year-old co-founder of a marketing company in Austin, Tex., had just about 40 Twitter followers. But his recent tweet about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations against President-elect Donald J. Trump fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory — one that Mr. Trump joined in promoting.

We all know the drill: There is a guaranteed consequence for not telling the truth. We have learned this early on in the popular parlor game that has kept us entertained at parties and get-togethers during our younger years. And even back then, there were occasions when we intentionally opted for the consequence, no matter how ridiculously difficult it was, because truth has its way of making us uncomfortable.

Something is deeply wrong when the pope’s voice, reputation and influence can be borrowed by a source that describes itself as “a fantasy news site” to claim that he has endorsed a presidential candidate, and then be amplified, unchallenged, through a million individual shares.

The attention paid to fake news since the election has focused largely on fabrications and outright lies, because they are indefensible, easy to identify and extraordinarily viral. Fake news is created by the kinds of people who, when asked, might call their work satire, or admit that they’re in it for the money or for the thrill of deception. Theirs is a behavior that can and should be shunned, and that Facebook is equipped, and maybe willing, to deal with.

HONG KONG — Facebook rumors force a well-known politician to publish proof of his heritage. Fake images show a prominent female leader in a hangman’s noose. A politician’s aide decries violent crime with a Facebook photo of a girl’s corpse — an image that turns out to come from another country.

In the week since Donald Trump’s victory, debate has raged over the role played by social media in the US election. Both Trump and his campaign’s digital director have partially credited social networks for his win, and Mark Zuckerberg has been under huge pressure to tackle the proliferation of fake stories on Facebook. On Wednesday, a BuzzFeed analysis found that fake news outperformed real news in the run-up to Election Day, and Oxford Dictionaries declared its word of the year to be “post-truth.” All in all, a tough time for objectivity.

It was a rough night for number crunchers. And for the faith that people in every field — business, politics, sports and academia — have increasingly placed in the power of data.

Donald J. Trump’s victory ran counter to almost every major forecast — undercutting the belief that analyzing reams of data can accurately predict events. Voters demonstrated how much predictive analytics, and election forecasting in particular, remains a young science: Some people may have been misled into thinking Hillary Clinton’s win was assured because some of the forecasts lacked context explaining potentially wide margins of error.

SAN FRANCISCO — Late on Tuesday night, as it became clear that Donald J. Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election, a private chat sprang up on Facebook among several vice presidents and executives of the social network.

What role, they asked each other, had their company played in the election’s outcome?