Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.

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Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

The hybrid media system: Politics and power

Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.

How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation (WP-12-14)

As globalization develops, demographics evolve, and the linguistic blueprint of many countries morphs, the complexity of both language and individual identity becomes more acute. Yet, despite such fluidity, language and identity remain inextricably connected. The following thesis seeks to examine this relationship by analyzing select areas of overlap. First, the topics of language and identity will be operationally defined through the lens of psychology and linguistics. The larger question—how language is used as an expression of individual identity— will then be explored in relation to the topics of code-switching, dialect, and how self-perceived language proficiency is used to affirm or deny cultural affiliation. What then follows are points of contention. That is, neither languages nor identities enjoy similar social prestige; on the contrary, both are unmistakably influenced by social constructs such as power. Because all individuals attach significance to aspects of their identity and language, the topic of this thesis is one of general interest. Beyond that, its implications are of notable importance in the study of bilingualism and the maintenance of language and identity across generations.

Language and Identity

In recent years, there has been a great deal of concern about the proliferation of false and misleading news on social media1–4. Academics and practitioners alike have asked why people share such misinformation, and sought solutions to reduce the sharing of misinformation5–7. Here, we attempt to address both of these questions. First, we find that the veracity of headlines has little effect on sharing intentions, despite having a large effect on judgments of accuracy. This dissociation suggests that sharing does not necessarily indicate belief. Nonetheless, most participants say it is important to share only accurate news. To shed light on this apparent contradiction, we carried out four survey experiments and a field experiment on Twitter; the results show that subtly shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people subsequently share. Together with additional computational analyses, these findings indicate that people often share misinformation because their attention is focused on factors other than accuracy—and therefore they fail to implement a strongly held preference for accurate sharing. Our results challenge the popular claim that people value partisanship over accuracy8,9, and provide evidence for scalable attention-based interventions that social media platforms could easily implement to counter misinformation online. Surveys and a field experiment with Twitter users show that prompting people to think about the accuracy of news sources increases the quality of the news that they share online.

/pdf/shifting-attention-to-accuracy-can-reduce-misinformation-15edqu9itp.pdf

Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online.

Concerns over fake news have triggered a renewed interest in various forms of media literacy. Prevailing expectations posit that literacy interventions help audiences to be “inoculated” against any...

Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don’t:

\n Despite long-standing concerns over self-reported measures of media use, media research has relied heavily on self-reported data. This study not only examined discrepancies between survey and logged smartphone data but assessed whether correlational outcomes using self-reported measures produce greater or smaller effect sizes compared to outcomes using logged measures. College students (n = 294) and MTurk workers (n = 291) provided self-reported and logged data of smartphone use over seven days. The correlations we examined involved four psychosocial contexts, including bridging, bonding, well-being, and problematic use of smartphones. The results showed that the effect sizes of correlations using self-reported data tend to be smaller compared to those using logged data. We believe that this is a hopeful message to the field. This could mean that extant survey results have not erroneously inflated communication findings and that communication researchers still have a lot to reveal with further refined measures.

Good News! Communication Findings May be Underestimated: Comparing Effect Sizes with Self-Reported and Logged Smartphone Use Data

Despite a fast-growing body of literature on fake news and mis-/disinformation, there remains surprisingly little empirical work on the social/political consequences of exposure to false informatio...

Perceptions of mis- or disinformation exposure predict political cynicism: Evidence from a two-wave survey during the 2018 US midterm elections:

This study investigates factors predicting political information sharing on social media in the election context. Specifically, the current study examines how users’ six motivations for political i...

Why Do People Share Political Information on Social Media

This study investigated whether increased technological affordances, characterized by the rise of social media, diversified communication in climate change discourse. Extending the literature of in...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1077699019874731

S. Mo Jones-Jang

Papers

Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don’t:

Good News! Communication Findings May be Underestimated: Comparing Effect Sizes with Self-Reported and Logged Smartphone Use Data

Perceptions of mis- or disinformation exposure predict political cynicism: Evidence from a two-wave survey during the 2018 US midterm elections:

Why Do People Share Political Information on Social Media

Diversifying or Reinforcing Science Communication? Examining the Flow of Frame Contagion Across Media Platforms: