Trump Falsely Claims  Again  That He Coined the Term â€ëœfake News
Stanford study examines fake news and the 2016 presidential election
Made stories favoring Donald Trump were shared a full of thirty million times, nearly quadruple the number of pro-Hillary Clinton shares leading up to the election, according to Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow. Fifty-fifty so, he and his co-writer observe that the most widely circulated hoaxes were seen past only a modest fraction of Americans.
Of all the heated debates surrounding the 2016 presidential race, the controversy over and so-chosen "imitation news" and its potential impact on Donald Trump's victory has been among the fiercest.
Matthew Gentzkow (Image credit: Courtesy SIEPR)
Now there's concrete data proposing that false news stories may non have been as persuasive and influential equally is often suggested. Simply the economists behind the research do non conclude one way or the other whether fake news swayed the election.
On Wednesday, economists Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford and Hunt Allcott of New York University released a study as well showing that social media played a much smaller part in the election than some might think.
"A reader of our report could very reasonably say, based on our set of facts, that information technology is unlikely that fake news swayed the election," said Gentzkow, an economic science professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Plant for Economic Policy Enquiry (SIEPR).
"Just that decision ultimately depends on what readers call up is a reasonable benchmark for the persuasiveness of an individual imitation news story," he said.
The timing of the working paper, "Social Media and Imitation News in the 2016 Election," is disquisitional. Trump'southward victory has been dogged past claims that false news stories – including false reports that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and the pope had endorsed Trump – altered the consequence.
Facebook and other social media sites have also come under attack for allowing fabricated news stories to circulate unchecked on their platforms.
"In that location are lots of pieces to this puzzle," said Gentzkow, referring to the impact of social media on the ballot.
Social media: 'Important, simply non dominant'
In their written report, Gentzkow and Allcott analyzed three sets of information. The first tracked the amount of traffic on news websites that was directed by social media. The 2nd examined the top simulated news stories identified past BuzzFeed and 2 prominent fact-checking sites, Snopes and PolitiFact. The third consisted of the researchers' own mail service-ballot online survey of ane,200 voters.
Gentzkow and Allcott show that social media wasn't the major source of political news for most Americans in 2016; only 14 percent say they relied on Facebook and other social media sites every bit their most important source of ballot coverage.
"Social media was an of import but not dominant source of news in the run-upwards to the ballot," the authors write. Television, information technology turns out, remains the go-to place for political news.
In the 3 months earlier the election, pro-Trump fabricated stories tracked by the researchers were shared a total of xxx 1000000 times, nearly quadruple the number of pro-Clinton shares. However, Gentzkow and Allcott find that the near widely circulated hoaxes were seen by only a small fraction of Americans. And only about half of those who saw a simulated news story believed information technology.
Even if a voter recalled a fake news story and believed what it said, the story would need to have been surprisingly persuasive to have changed his or her vote.
"For fake news to have changed the result of the election, a single false news story would need to have convinced nigh 0.seven percent of Clinton voters and non-voters who saw information technology to shift their votes to Trump, a persuasion rate equivalent to seeing 36 television campaign ads," the authors conclude.
The written report comes with important caveats. Gentzkow said, for example, that a voter doesn't necessarily need to recall a specific news story in social club to have developed a negative view of either Trump or Clinton.
A deeper partisan divide?
The 2016 election isn't the only fourth dimension when applied science has been seen as a threat to balloter politics, Gentzkow and Allcott notation. Both the advent of inexpensive newsprint and television were considered unsafe to American democracy.
Social media is creating its own set of hazards with potentially profound implications, Gentzkow said. Increasingly, the influence of major media outlets is diminishing, especially at a time when anyone tin dream upwardly and disseminate a story, real or not, with nothing more than than an imagination and Net access.
Gene in the possibility that social media could further segregate voters based on political party amalgamation and "you have a potential game-changer in terms of the caste of polarization in this country," Gentzkow said.
Source: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/18/stanford-study-examines-fake-news-2016-presidential-election/
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