Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown

Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown<br />Guess and Mr. Reifler found that the mean number of articles on fake news websites visited by Trump supporters was 13.1,<br />but only 40 percent of his supporters visited such websites, and they represented only about 6 percent of the pages they visited on sites focusing on news topics.<br />For instance, a study I conducted with Andrew Guess of Princeton and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter in Britain showed<br />that exposure to fake news websites before the 2016 election was heavily concentrated among the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative information diets — not exactly swing voters.<br />Similar suggestions of large persuasion effects, supposedly pushing Mr. Trump to victory, have been made<br />about online advertising from the firm Cambridge Analytica and content promoted by Russian bots.<br />Here’s what you should look for in evaluating claims about vast persuasion effects from dubious online content:<br />How many people actually saw the questionable material.<br />The total number of shares or likes that fake news and bots attract can sound enormous until you consider how much information circulates online.