The Senate Intelligence Committee is meeting Thursday to discuss Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
As they will discuss multiple aspects of this issue, the topic of fake news and intentionally bogus reports will likely come up. But when you hear this, just remember: Fake news didn’t actually sway the election, according to a study by researchers at Stanford and New York University.
“[W]e observe that rumors, conspiracy theories, and other cousins of fake news are not new to the social media era … conspiracy theories with political implications that have circulated over the past half-century,” their study noted.
However, they added, the 2016 conspiracy theories “are slightly different than most of the fake news we study, in the sense that many fake news articles can be traced back to a single person who invented the article without any facts to back it up, whereas [normal] conspiracy theories could in principle be true and often have no unique origin.”
The study stressed that social media “was an important but not dominant source of news in the run-up to the election.”
The study concluded: “In summary, our data suggest that social media were not the most important source of election news, and even the most widely circulated fake news stories were seen by only a relatively small number of Americans, and probably most of them were rabid partisans passing between one another articles that seemed to confirm their worldview.
For fake news stories to have changed the outcome of the election, they would probably need to have convinced about 0.7 percent of all Clinton supporters and non-voters who saw it — or at least 150,000 of them, properly distributed between Florida and Pennsylvania — to shift their votes to Trump or to vote for him when they would not have voted otherwise. That’s a persuasion rate equivalent to what theoretically happens when voters see 36 television campaign ads.
