Who believed the fake news?

Who believed the fake news?

by digby

President Trump has said repeatedly that Russian interference didn't matter in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he has suggested — wrongly — that the intelligence and law enforcementcommunities have said the same. His overriding fear seems to be that Russian interference and the “fake news” it promoted would undermine the legitimacy of his election win.

Trump won't like this new study one bit.

The study from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.

Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, the study's authors, inserted three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn't vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).

Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):
Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)

Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.

I wrote about the "very poor health" thing which was everywhere long before she got pneumonia and was echoed by Trump himself every time he said "she doesn't have the strength or the stamina" to be president, one of his endless refrains from the very beginning designed to tweak the sexist lizard brain.

I don't know if these fake stories really had anything to do with it or if most of these people had only voted for Obama in 2008 because the country was in economic freefall and they didn't trust the McCain and the lunatic he put on the ticket. But these stories were everywhere on social media so it stands to reason that some not-so-bright people might have believed them.

It's difficult to know how fake news played specifically in the three states that delivered him the presidency: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But the fact that Clinton lost each of these divisive states by less than one percentage point means that even a slight impact by Russia and/or fake news — or even then-FBI Director James B. Comey's announcement about Clinton's emails or some other factor — could logically have changed the result.

But we can use this study to glean clues and even rerun a hypothetical 2016 election. The Washington Post's polling director, Scott Clement, ran a predictive probability analysis using the OSU team's data and compared the existing 2016 election to a hypothetical election in which these fake news stories didn't exist. The result: Clinton lost 4.2 percent more of Obama's votes in the race with fake news vs. the hypothetical race without it.

I'm sure none of my readers need this but maybe you'd like to pass it on some of your relatives?

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