Does fake news, also known as stories based on false information, influence voters?
Although their effect may be small, a recent study finds that fake news can influence major events, such as the US presidential election.
The Ohio State University study suggests that about 4% of 2012 supporters of President Barack Obama were discouraged from voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by belief in stories based on false information.
According to Facebook's testimony to the US Senate, an estimated 126 million Americans read Russian-backed, politically-oriented fake stories through the social media platform during the 2016 US presidential election campaign.
Not every Facebook user exposed to fake news stories may trust them. But if these fake stories only affect a fraction of readers, it could have changed the outcome of a close race, the study suggests.
Fake news eclipses the real news
Before the 2016 presidential election, the 20 most popular fake stories received more reactions and comments (8.7 million engagements) than the 20 most popular real news stories (7.3 million engagements), the report said.
Social media drives more users to fake news sites than to real or credible news sites. According to a 2017 study by the Journal of Perspectives Economy, more than 40% of visits to 65 fake news sites come from social media, compared to about 10% of visits to 690 major news sites in the US.
More than a quarter of adults over voting age visited at least one fake news website online that supported candidates Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, according to research from Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Exeter. The research suggests that these visits in the crucial weeks before Election Day may have influenced the final outcome.
Different audiences see news differently
Conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe things that are not true when the consequences of these stories could be negative or predict danger, according to research conducted by a team from UCLA in 2017, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The study also found that conservatives were more likely than moderates or liberals to share articles with false content.
However, age also plays a role in this regard. The researchers found that less than 10% of Americans have shared a fake article, while the largest percentage of these readers are seniors over 65. Senior citizens share fake articles on Facebook at a rate seven times higher than that of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the study published in January 2019 in the journal Science Advances.
(Article from KSL News Radio)