‘Fake news’: wide reach, little impact, says study
False stories were a small fraction of the participants’ overall news diet
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, like 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 politicians and the president 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 thousands 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 President Trump — consumed far more of the real kind, from newspaper and network websites and other digital sources.
While the research can’t settle the question of whether misinformation was pivotal in the 2016 election, the findings give the public and researchers the first solid guide to asking how its influence may have played out. That question will become increasingly important as online giants like Facebook and Google turn to shielding their users from influence by Russian operatives and other online malefactors.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about the effect of fake news and a lot of numbers thrown around out of context, which get people exercised,” said Duncan Watts, a research scientist at Microsoft who has argued that misinformation had a negligible effect on the election results. “What’s nice about this paper is that it focuses on the actual consumers themselves.”
In the new study, a trio of political scientists — Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (a regular contributor to The Times’s Upshot), Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter — analysed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity monitored 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 vast majority of participants favoured Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton.)
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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump. Even conservative partisans viewed just five fake news articles, on average, over more than five weeks.
There was no way to determine from the data how much, or whether, people believed what they saw on these sites. But many of these were patently absurd, like one accusing Mrs. Clinton of a “Sudden Move of $1.8 Billion to Qatar Central Bank”, or a piece headlined “Video Showing Bill Clinton With a 13Year-Old Plunges Race Into Chaos”.
“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognise that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” Dr. Nyhan said.
“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added. “These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.” Given the ratio of truth to fiction, Dr. Watts said, fake news paled in influence beside mainstream news coverage, particularly stories about Mrs. Clinton and her use of a private email server as secretary of state.