Allcott, H., and Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. (Maddie)

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Review

This article was authored to tackle the lack of clarity surrounding the effects of widespread amounts of ‘fake news’ can potentially have on political races. Recent evidence shows identifies that 62% of US adults get their news on social media, and that the most popular ‘fake news’ story was shared more over Facebook than the most popular traditional news stories. Though social media is not overtaking mainstream media as the primary source of information for many people, it is becoming more popular and is offering easier modes of dissemination of information. There is also a lack of barrier to access, meaning anyone can author ‘news’ articles regardless of credibility and qualification.

During the 2016 Presidential election, there was an increased amount of fake news stories circulating surrounding candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Of these stories, it was found that more fake news stories were in favour of Trump instead of Clinton. Given the close (and controversial) ending to the 2016 election, it is important to analyze the impact that these fake news stories had on voters, and acknowledge whether or not they could have been enough to make a significant difference in the results of the 2016 Presidential Election. This paper identifies itself as one of the first academic studies of its kind discussing the tangible effects of fake news media on election results, thus aiding in the pioneering of this kind of research.

Using a 1200-person survey, the authors took a database of 156 news stories that were considered false news or misleading headlines that took place during the three months leading up to the 2016 election. They then had people answer the survey and identify whether or not they had seen the article in question, and whether or not they though that the information given was true. Within the given articles, it was ensured that there was an equal split of 15 pro-Hillary articles and 15 pro-trump articles.

The authors found that the majority of these stories were titled heavily in favour of Donald Trump, outnumbering the pro-Clinton stories almost 3 to 1. Though there are generally assumptions about what political parties are more likely to believe ‘fake’ news, the authors also found that no matter the party, people were 15% more likely to believe in headlines that aligned with their own political beliefs, regardless of fact checking whether the information is true. They also found that republicans tended to be more critical of all kinds of news articles, while democrats were more likely to report that they did not believe in a fake news article. Based on the size of the lie, they then coded the results based on how false or true each story was and weighted the results.

The biggest strength of this paper is that it consistently calls out biases that could arise from the presented information. In a world where our political sphere is becoming more of an ‘us versus them’ mentality, the authors consistently pointed out that just because their findings indicated something, does not mean that it was the only truth out there. For example, they state that “these statistics show that more of the fake news articles on these three fact-checking sites are right-leaning” (p. 223) before going on to list potential reasons that could be the case. I think that by visibly listing all the potential weaknesses or issues with gathered information allows readers to be aware of potentially misinterpreting research when writing their own papers. It also brings up a lot of smaller topics that need to be explored within this overarching branch of ‘fake news’. In the future, it would be beneficial to further examine how social media has come to affect the production of fake news, as the authors stated it is a driving force behind the increase in falsified news stories. In their findings, they also stated that people were more likely to believe things that were ideologically aligned on social media because people are less likely to be friends with those who do not mimic their political beliefs.

An easily identifiable weakness is that they only took 156 fake news articles, and only from 3 fact-checking sites. This is not a large pool of information to draw from, and seeing as it was concluded that the fake news found on these fact-checking sites was right leaning, it is evident that the limited resources could potentially skew the results. They also admitted that a “fake news story could have been more effective than a television commercial”, but there was no additional research to go into the persuasive qualities of fake news. While people might remember or not remember something they read, there was no analysis in to whether or not those stories could have subliminally changed people’s opinions on a candidate. There is also no way to account for fake news stories that were read but forgotten about, or read and not brought up in this individual study due to the limited number of samples. Ultimately, while useful, this article feels like a stepping stone for future research to branch off of. Another weakness is that surveys are not always representative of the population, and people who are going to be taking a survey on the topic of politics might be more politically engaged and aware than the average American voter.

In conclusion, it was found that social media is an important and up and coming source of political information, but not a dominant one. Due to people only remembering anywhere between one to several fake news articles that were republican leaning, if that data was assumed to have the same effect as television campaigns, the effect of fake news should have numerically only made several hundredths of a point of difference in voting margins. Though this seems small, further research could be performed to go into more detail regarding the effects of fake news over a longer period of time than three months, and could therefore track trends over time to deliver more insightful results.


Reference

Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-236. doi:10.3386/w23089

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