The list of things Hillary Clinton blames for losing the 2016 presidential election is long.
She blames the Russians. She blames the FBI. She blames the electoral college. She blames systemic sexism. She blames the coverage of her campaign. She blames alleged voter suppression tactics. She blames the voters. She even blames “fake news” for allegedly turning the electorate against her.
The former secretary of state may have to retire at least one of those excuses now that researches have determined intentionally false “news” reporting has little actual impact on readers.
“One in four Americans saw at least one false story, but even the most eager fake-news readers — deeply conservative supporters of President Trump — consumed far more of the real kind, from newspaper and network websites and other digital sources,” the New York Times’ Benedict Carey reported, citing a study titled, “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.”
To be clear, researchers found that fake news’ reach is wide. They also found that it skews mostly in President Trump’s favor, and that it’s consumed mostly by self-identified conservatives. However, as Carey put it, fake news’ reach is pretty shallow.
Microsoft’s Duncan Watts has long argued that fake news had little, if any, impact on how people voted in the 2016 election.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about the effect of fake news and a lot of numbers thrown around out of context, which get people exercised,” Watts told the Times. “What’s nice about this paper is that it focuses on the actual consumers themselves.”
The Times explains the study, which was a collaboration between Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Exeter, thusly:
In the new study, a trio of political scientists … analyzed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity monitored anonymously by the survey and analytic firm YouGov.
The data included website visits made in the weeks before and after the 2016 election, and a measure of political partisanship based on overall browsing habits. …The team defined a visited website as fake news if it posted at least two demonstrably false stories, as defined by economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow in research published last year. On 289 such sites, about 80 percent of bogus articles supported Mr. Trump.
Interestingly enough, researchers found that fake stories accounted for only a small percentage of readers’ overall news consumption. For pro-Clinton readers, the fake stuff accounted for only one percent of their total news consumption. Pro-Trump readers on average took in about 6 percent of false reporting. These same users were also about three times more likely to visit fake news sites supporting Trump than pro-Clinton users were to visit phony sites promoting her.
“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognize that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” researcher Brendan Nyhan told the Times.
“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added. “These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.”
To be clear, the data doesn’t state conclusively that “fake news” had zero impact on 2016. However, their measurement of its relative influence, or lack thereof, shows its overall impact on the Clinton/Trump slugfest was most likely minimal.
So minimal, in fact, that it’d be a real stretch of the imagination to say Clinton lost because of it.
