After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: “fake news.” False or misleading information published by dubious for-profit websites had spread widely on Facebook, reaching millions of people in the final months of the campaign. This development provided a tidy narrative that resonated with concerns about potential online echo chambers.
More than two years later, we can now evaluate these claims. And it turns out that many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. CONT.
Brendan Nyhan (U. of Michigan), Medium