“Fake news” may have limited effects on political participation beyond increasing beliefs in false claims

Abstract

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of interest in misinformation and its role in elections. Research by news outlets, government agencies, and academics alike has shown that millions of Americans have been exposed to dubious political news online. However, relatively little research has focused on documenting the effects of consuming this content. Our results suggest that many claims about the effects of exposure to false news may be overstated, or, at the very least, misunderstood.

Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality

“…Fake news, as it is presently being discussed, spreads largely via social media sites (and, in particular, Facebook; ref. 3). As a result, understanding what can be done to discourage the sharing of—and belief in—false or misleading stories online is a question of great importance.…”

Beyond “fake news”: Analytic thinking and the detection of false and hyperpartisan news headlines

“…This poses a major problem because even a single prior exposure to a false political headline increases later belief in the headline (Pennycook, Cannon, & Rand, 2018). Although recent analyses indicate that "fake news" is not as prevalent as many thought (and certainly not as prevalent as factual information; Grinberg et al, 2019;Guess, Nagler, & Tucker, 2019;, false content is likely to have an impact on individual belief (Guess, Lockett, et al, 2020)(e.g., the "Pizzagate" incident; Hsu, 2017, June 13). Furthermore, content that is misleading and partisan, instead of entirely false, is likely to be widespread on social media (Faris et al, 2017).…”

The Impact of the Supply of Fake News on Consumer Behavior During the 2016 US Election

“…6 OpenSources tags sites that "entirely fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports"; there were 614 domains so classified as of January 31, 2017. 7 Although the most popular fake news articles were those maligning Hillary Clinton's candidacy, other articles were critical of Donald Trump Guess et al, 2017). We also reference a list of news domains that OpenSources categorizes as "credible"-in other words, news and information that is circulated in a "manner consistent with traditional and ethical practices in journalism."…”

“…Misinformation during the 2016 US election was therefore probably distinct from prior iterations and has elicited concern about how "fake news" influences elections. Recent studies have analyzed the spread of fake news (Del Vicario et al, 2016) and how social media affected exposure to it Fourney et al, 2017;Guess et al, 2017), but there is still uncertainty about the extent to which users responded to fake news. That particular mechanism has attracted the attention of US Congressional committees seeking to discover how non-US-linked Facebook advertising influenced voters (Shane and Isaac, 2017).…”

“…Vosoughi et al (2018) examine fake news from 2016 and 2017 and find that it spread much more rapidly than did credible news. Guess et al (2017) investigate the differential consumption of fake news based on prior browsing history.…”