Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence …

1 Selective Exposure to misinformation : Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the2016 presidential campaignAndrew GuessDepartment of PoliticsPrinceton UniversityBrendan NyhanDepartment of GovernmentDartmouth CollegeJason ReiflerDepartment of PoliticsUniversity of ExeterJanuary 9, 2018 AbstractThough some warnings about online echo chambers have been hyperbolic, tenden-cies toward Selective Exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extendto misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test thisprediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as fake news. Usingunique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories,we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website fromOctober 7-November 14, 2016.

2 Trump supporters visited the most fake news web-sites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption washeavily concentrated among a small group almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news web-sites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online informationdiets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of Exposure to fake news andthat fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its are grateful to the Poynter Institute, Knight Foundation, and American Press Institute for generousfunding support; Craig Silverman for graciously sharing data; Samantha Luks and Marissa Shih atYouGov for assistance with survey administration; and Kevin Arceneaux, Travis Coan, David Ciuk,Lorien Jasny, David Lazer, Thomas Leeper, Adam Seth Levine, Ben Lyons, Cecilia Mo, Simon Munzert,and Spencer Piston for helpful comments.

3 We are also grateful to Angela Cai, Jack Davidson, KathrynFuhs, Jose Burnes Garza, Guy Green, Jessica Lu, Annie Ma, Sarah Petroni, Morgan Sandhu, PriyaSankar, Amy Sun, Andrew Wol , and Alexandra Woodru for excellent research assistance. Reiflerreceived funding support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union sHorizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 682758).The combination of rising partisanship and pervasive social media usage in the United States havecreated fears of widespread echo chambers and filter bubbles (Sunstein, 2001; Pariser, 2011).To date, these warnings appear to be overstated.

4 Behavioral data indicates that only a subset ofAmericans have heavily skewed media consumption patterns (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2011; Barber aet al., 2015; Flaxman, Goel, and Rao, 2016; Guess, 2016).However, the risk of information polarization remains. Research shows people tend to prefercongenial information, including political news, when given the choice ( , Stroud, 2008; Hartet al., 2009; Iyengar and Hahn, 2009; Iyengar et al., 2008), but these studies typically focus on howideological slant a ects the content people choose to consume; relatively little is known about howselective Exposure extends to false or misleading factual claims.

5 Research in political science andpsychology has documented that misperceptions are often systematically related to people s politicalidentities and predispositions (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler, 2017). In this article, we thereforeevaluate whether people di erentially consume false information that reinforces their political viewsas theories of Selective Exposure would additionally consider the extent to which social media usage exacerbates tendencies towardselective Exposure to misinformation . Though Messing and Westwood (2014) find that social en-dorsements can help overcome partisan cues when people are choosing news content, other researchindicates that tendencies toward Selective Exposure to attitude-consistent news and informationmay be exacerbated by the process of sharing and consuming content online ( , Bakshy, Mess-ing, and Adamic, 2015).

6 In this way, social media consumption may also be a mechanism increasingdi erential Exposure to factually dubious but attitude-consistent , we analyze whether fact-checking a new format that is increasingly used to counterpolitical misinformation e ectively reached consumers of fake news during the 2016 fact-checks are relatively widely read and associated with greater political knowledge ( ,Gottfried et al., 2013), they are often disseminated online in a politically slanted manner that islikely to increase Selective Exposure and reduce consumption of counter-attitudinal fact-checks (Shinand Thorson, 2017). To date, however, no previous research has considered whether consumers offact-checks have been exposed to the claims that they evaluate.

7 Does Selective Exposure underminethe e ectiveness of fact-checking?We evaluate these questions in the context of the rise of so-called fake news, a new form1of political misinformation that features prominently in journalistic accounts of the 2016 election ( , Solon, 2016). Data from Facebook indicates that these factually dubiousfor-profit articles were shared by millions of people (Silverman, 2016). Many people also reportbelieving the claims that fake news sites promoted in post-election surveys (Silverman and Singer-Vine, 2016; Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017).However, little is known scientifically about theconsumptionof fake news, including who readit, the mechanisms by which it was disseminated, and the extent to which fact-checks reached fakenews consumers.

8 These questions are critical to understanding how Selective Exposure can distortthefactualinformation that people consume a key question for therefore examine the prevalence and mechanisms of Exposure to fake news websites in aunique dataset that combines pre-election survey responses and comprehensive web tra c data froma national sample of Americans. Our design allows us to provide the first individual-level estimatesof visits to fake news websites, including who visited these websites, how much and which types offake news they consumed, and the probability that fact-checks reached fake news website can thus provide the first measures of the prevalence of Selective Exposure to misinformation inreal-world , we find that approximately one in four Americans visited a fake news website, butthat consumption was disproportionately observed among Trump supporters for whom its largelypro-Trump content was attitude-consistent.

9 However, this pattern of Selective Exposure was heavilyconcentrated among a small subset of people almost six in ten visits to fake news websites camefrom the 10% of Americans with the most conservative information diets. Finally, we specificallyidentify Facebook as the most important mechanism facilitating the spread of fake news and showthat fact-checking largely failed to e ectively reach consumers of fake together, these results suggest a need to revisit the study of Selective Exposure usingmeasures of real-world media consumption and to consider the behavioral mechanisms by whichpeople are exposed to and resultsData for the analyses below combine responses to an online public opinion survey from a nationalsample of 2.

10 525 Americans with web tra c data collected passively from their computers withtheir consent during the October 7 November 14, 2016 period. Our primary outcome variables arecomputed from web tra c data and measure the type and/or quantity of websites publishing fakenews that respondents visited. We employ survey weights to approximate the adult population ofthe (Further details on the sample and the survey weights are provided in the Supplemen-tary Materials, where we show that the sample closely resembles the population in both itsdemographic characteristics and privacy attitudes.)The survey questions we administered allow us to examine the relationship between demographicand attitudinal variables ( , candidate preference) and visits to fake news websites.