How fake news keeps a wide, but shallow, reach
Fake news evolved from seedy internet sideshow to serious electoral threat so quickly that behavioural scientists had little time to answer basic questions about it, such as who was reading what, how much real news they also consumed and whether targeted fact-checking efforts ever hit a target.
Sure, surveys abound, asking people what they remember reading. But these are only as precise as the respondents’ shifty recollections and subject to a malleable definition of “fake.” The term “fake news” itself has evolved into an all-purpose smear, used by the U.S. president and other politicians to deride journalism they don’t like.
But now the first hard data on fakenews consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thou- sands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.
The reach of fake news was wide indeed, the study found, yet also shallow. One in four Americans saw at least one false story, but even the most eager fake-news readers — deeply conservative supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump — consumed far more of the real kind, from newspaper and network websites and other digital sources.
In the new study, a trio of political scientists — Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (a regular contributor to The Times’ Upshot), Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter — analyzed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity moni- tored anonymously by the survey and analytic firm YouGov.
The data included website visits made in the weeks before and after the 2016 election, and a measure of political partisanship based on overall browsing habits.
The team defined a visited website as fake news if it posted at least two demonstrably false stories, as defined by economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow in research published last year. On 289 such sites, about 80 per cent of bogus articles supported Trump.
The online behaviour of the participants was expected in some ways, but surprising in others. Consumption broke down along partisan lines: the most conservative 10 per cent of the sample accounted for about 65 per cent of visits to fake news sites.
Pro-Trump users were about three times more likely to visit fake news sites supporting their candidate than Clinton partisans were to visit bogus sites promoting her.
Still, false stories were a small fraction of the participants’ overall news diet, regardless of political preference: just 1 per cent among Clinton supporters and 6 per cent among those pulling for Trump. Even conservative partisans viewed just five fake news articles, on average, over more than five weeks.
“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognize that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” Nyhan said.
“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added.
“These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.”