It was during a semester spent in Washington, D.C., during college that I first remember encountering fake news. I was leaving the Roosevelt Memorial near the National Mall when I overheard a family on vacation having a political discussion: George W. Bush was going to suspend the 22nd Amendment and declare himself president for life.
This wouldn’t have seemed odd to me, a naive 20-year-old who had experience with crazy college students: but the people making these allegations were the parents, and not the children. Teens and the politically immature were prone to believing in crazy conspiracy theories, but at that point, I thought that people grow out of conspiracy theories that they hear through the grapevine.
Since then, the grapevine has grown into a world-wide web, and political tribalism has become more entrenched. People are now prone to believe all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories, but when it comes to politics, they’re most likely to follow the trends defined by whoever holds the White House: either in favor or against.
The rise of the social web occurred almost exclusively in the Obama administration, and the people in that era most prone to conspiracy theorizing were Republicans who opposed the president. From Barack Obama’s birthplace to his sexual orientation to his plan to put Americans into FEMA camps, Republicans could be found to believe in all sorts of crazy things.
But pollsters have long struggled to separate out genuine belief in conspiracies from tribalism. Someone who doesn’t like Obama’s policies is prone to agree with outlandish statements about him; the correlating stance for Democrats and President Trump is likely to be similar. Indeed, in a 2008 experiment, partisans who were paid to get questions right on a conspiracy theory quiz answered much more accurately than partisans who were not paid.
So here’s a question: Did Trump coincidentally show up at a gala thrown by a foreign diplomat after he pressured the diplomat to have the gala at the Washington, D.C., Trump Hotel and potentially violate presidential ethics laws?
The answer is no, he did not. A liberal news website reported that a diplomatic event held by the ambassador of Kuwait had its location changed to the Trump Hotel after Trump’s election as a result of political pressure. One of the authors of that report then announced that Trump had coincidentally shown up at the Trump Hotel during the event, as if to prove the insinuation of his initial report that Trump was selling influence. This didn’t happen: The reporter had mistaken which day that Kuwait’s event was being held, and deleted his allegations after being corrected.
(Fact-checking website Snopes, by the way, rates the original story as ‘unproven.’)
It’s likely that false allegations about Trump’s corruption like this would poll highly as being true. It plays into the anti-Trump narrative that many have baked into their heads. What’s more, putting out false information like this is more harmful to the truth than we might believe. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler termed this the “backfire effect”: Attempting to correct falsehoods can actually increase peoples’ belief in their veracity.
Liberals in the Trump era must be wary if they do not want to succumb to the conspiracy-theorizing that they have so often accused conservatives of subscribing to. Being the political coalition out of power leads to a little bit of nuttiness, as in the family that believed President Bush would install himself as president-for-life, or that Democrats disproportionately believed in a 9/11 cover-up. In an era of the social web, the dangers of fake news, viral lies and the backfire effect, progressives need to be careful. They could succumb to the kind of media echo chamber they lament on the right.
Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of outreach and policy at The Franklin Center and was previously managing editor at Townhall. His views here are his own.
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