TY - JOUR
T1 - Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election
AU - Guess, Andrew M.
AU - Nyhan, Brendan
AU - Reifler, Jason
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank D. Kahan and C. Silverman for sharing data; S. Luks and M. Shih at YouGov for assistance with survey administration; K. Arceneaux, Y. Benkler, D. Ciuk, T. Coan, L. Jasny, D. Kahan, D. Lazer, J. Leahy, T. Leeper, A. S. Levine, B. Lyons, C. Mo, S. Munzert and S. Piston for providing comments and feedback; B. Bao, J. Barancik, A. Cai, J. Davidson, K. Fuhs, J. Burnes Garza, G. Green, J. Lu, A. Ma, H. Parkhurst, S. Petroni, M. Sandhu, P. Sankar, A. Sun, J. Sweetow, A. Wolff and A. Woodruff for research assistance. This project received funding support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 682758). We are grateful to the Poynter Institute, Knight Foundation and American Press Institute for funding support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2020/5/1
Y1 - 2020/5/1
N2 - Although commentators frequently warn about echo chambers, little is known about the volume or slant of political misinformation that people consume online, the effects of social media and fact checking on exposure, or the effects of political misinformation on behaviour. Here, we evaluate these questions for websites that publish factually dubious content, which is often described as fake news. Survey and web-traffic data from the 2016 US presidential campaign show that supporters of Donald Trump were most likely to visit these websites, which often spread through Facebook. However, these websites made up a small share of people’s information diets on average and were largely consumed by a subset of Americans with strong preferences for pro-attitudinal information. These results suggest that the widespread speculation about the prevalence of exposure to untrustworthy websites has been overstated.
AB - Although commentators frequently warn about echo chambers, little is known about the volume or slant of political misinformation that people consume online, the effects of social media and fact checking on exposure, or the effects of political misinformation on behaviour. Here, we evaluate these questions for websites that publish factually dubious content, which is often described as fake news. Survey and web-traffic data from the 2016 US presidential campaign show that supporters of Donald Trump were most likely to visit these websites, which often spread through Facebook. However, these websites made up a small share of people’s information diets on average and were largely consumed by a subset of Americans with strong preferences for pro-attitudinal information. These results suggest that the widespread speculation about the prevalence of exposure to untrustworthy websites has been overstated.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41562-020-0833-x
DO - 10.1038/s41562-020-0833-x
M3 - Article
C2 - 32123342
AN - SCOPUS:85081743293
SN - 2397-3374
VL - 4
SP - 472
EP - 480
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
IS - 5
ER -