Posted on 02/03/2017 5:04:19 AM PST by markomalley
As social media sites like Facebook and Snapchat move to eliminate “fake news” reports from their sites, researchers from Stanford and New York Universities say Americans can be sure of one thing: the phenomenon did not affect the results of the presidential election.
The new study released last month investigated the influence that fake news may have had on President Trump’s victory.
NYU economics professor Hunt Allcott and Stanford economics professor Matthew Gentzkow led the research. The pair ran a series of tests to determine which fake news articles were circulated, how much of it was circulated, and the amount of voters that believed the stories to be true.
Once they gathered an assortment of fake news stories, Gentzkow and Allcott used fact-checking resources in order to verify that these stories were fake. They then conducted a post-election survey that consisted of 1,200 voters.
Participants were asked what their primary or “most important” source of 2016 election news was. Next, they were presented with a list of true and false news stories, and asked two questions concerning each individual story. The first was whether or not the participant remembered seeing the story. The second question asked whether or not they believed the story.
Although fake news stories in Trump’s favor were shared more times (30 million compared to 8 million for Hillary Clinton), the authors of the report had determined that these stories still did not reach enough voters nationwide to change the election results.
“The average American saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with just over half of those who recalled seeing fake news stories believing them,” the authors wrote. But, “for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.”
The observers’ work also revealed that a majority of voters were capable of accurately deciding whether or not a news story was true. They concluded that an insignificant number of American voters casted their final decision based on false information.
“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 small fraction of Americans,” the study concludes.
If Stanford and New York Universities came to that conclusion I have to believe it, only because they both are more inclined to manufacture just the opposite conclusion.
There have been downright lies about candidates since the beginning of time. Short of censorship it can’t be stopped and people deal with it. IMHO everything out of Obama’s mouth was fake but I never thought people should be prevented from hearing it.
These guys are going to pay for their failure to toe the party line.
Part of the ‘factor’ that big news fails to grasp on this fake news topic....is that news goes in, and news goes out....people have virtually no memory of anything beyond a headline. Go ask anyone to go and name Jimmy Carter’s VP, or to name the Attorney General under Bush.
Most guys can sit and remmber the last ten Super Bowl winners, but if you asked them to name MVP of the NFL for the past years....it’s doubtful if you find more than one single guy out of a hundred that can do this.
Fake news doesn’t matter, because even real news doesn’t really matter.
All the bad news about Hillary was NOT FAKE!
The democrats are in favor of you never hearing anything in opposition to their "narrative." In one of his final interviews Obama blamed his loss on the inability to reach the people with his message. He claimed that if it wasn't for radio talk shows, he would have been way more successful.
T. Carlson interviewed Jonathan Gruber last week, he said the same thing, people believed the "propaganda" against ACA way more than the law they were passing.
Tucker said, people are experiencing realty with your law, they are receiving 50-100% increases in premiums, they are experiencing shortage of doctor, they are experiencing long waits for tests or surgeries, Gruber, are you saying your glowing review of the law you wrote trumps the actual real life experience of American citizens? Yes is how he answered.
Fake study about fake news.
Check p. 26 of the pdf for the list of real and fake headlines.
All the math in the world isn’t going to fix a biased study.
p.s.
IMO, this fake study is trying to cover up major media bias, including fake news to help Hitlery and hurt Trump, as well as allegations that true stories that exposed Hitlery’s corruption were false. This media bias overwhelmingly helped Hitlery and they are now scrambling hard with fake studies to try to convince people that it didn’t.
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