News flash on fake news and politics
New research by political scientists strongly suggests that despite their best efforts, Russian-generated fake news didn’t put Donald Trump on the presidential throne.
In fact, researchers say, the impact of that allegedly massive misinformation campaign amounted not to a bang, but a whimper.
Take that, big bad Vlad.
According to a Columbia Journalism Review article published last week, researchers from the University of Michigan, Princeton and elsewhere tracked and recorded (with permission) the online activity of a statistically valid sample of citizens. Armed with actual data about the online information absorbed by these users, the researchers then interviewed them about their perceptions of that content.
Researchers came away with several interesting conclusions.
- Misinformation from the fake news sites made up 2 percent or less of an average reader’s online news consumption.
- Among older, more conservative online readers — the group most likely to encounter the fake news, according to researchers — only 8 percent of what they read was blatantly bogus. Even then, another researcher explained, the fake news largely reinforced what many of these readers wanted to believe anyway. In that sense, it didn’t sway them to vote differently than they would have without the fake news.
- Likely because Facebook started clamping down, researchers found that the reach of fake news declined between the 2016 general election and last November’s midterm election.
Bottom line?
“No credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election,” said researcher Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan.
Columbia Journalism Review asked Nyhan why the myth of the fake news tidal wave, without any real evidence, swept the nation. Nyhan’s theory is that what happened (or didn’t happen) in the election was similar to Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio play in 1938.
There’s little evidence that the broadcast set off widespread panic because it was heard by a very small audience. However, newspapers likely overplayed the impact in an effort to discredit radio as a news source, Nyhan said. Back to the 2016 election: The CJR article says, “concerns about fake news being spread by Russian agents on Facebook are fueled by broader concerns about the influence of social networks on society.”
None of this suggests that distorted information meant to sow discord or otherwise negatively influence society isn’t a real threat. It is. On Sunday, we’ll have some fun and shed a little light on a fascinating tool designed to help people ferret out the most biased news sources from the most legitimate.