Only 38% of them say they accept the poll outcome, according to a survey by Bright Line Watch. Also, 80% of Republicans say they believe the Democrats will cheat in next month’s election by allowing unauthorized immigrants to vote.
On the other side, about third of Democrats say they believe the Trump assassination attempts were staged, and more than a third claim that J.D. Vance admitted in his book that he’d had sex with a couch.
Who is to blame for mistaken beliefs? It’s too easy to cast blame on misinformation circulated via social media. It’s just not that simple, said Duncan Watts, director of the computational social science lab at Penn and co-author of a review paper in Nature, ‘Misunderstanding the Harms of Online Misinformation.’
He thinks journalists and researchers may be overestimating the polarizing influence of misinformation. He and his co-authors refer to various studies showing fake news was a relatively small share of what circulated on social media.
They cited other data showing that most social media users didn’t see “false and inflammatory” misinformation; those who did were fringe partisans who had “strong motivations to seek out such information.”
Moreover, social media might not even be the most important source of mistaken beliefs. Republicans’ widespread belief in a stolen election, for example, traces back to former president Donald Trump.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, agrees. “I think it’s fair to say people seem to overrate how much misinformation is [on social media],” he said, especially when seen in proportion to the vast sea of content flowing around us.
Nyhan worries that the repeated message that misinformation is pervasive has caused people to vastly overestimate the portion of news that’s demonstrably false, and could convince some to doubt genuine information—such as real reports of assassination attempts on Trump.
And it misses many other ways people are being misled using half-truths and distortions that don’t fit into a true-false binary categorization.
Nyhan is a co-author of both the survey showing the prevalence of dubious beliefs and the Nature paper suggesting we’re exaggerating the harms of online lies.
Those findings might sound contradictory, he told me, but they’re not. That’s because the availability of some false information isn’t the best explanation for the widespread embrace of dubious narratives.
And misinformation isn’t necessarily what’s pulling people into opposing versions of reality. Some studies show polarization comes first. It motivates partisans to seek out and accept fake news that supports their side.
The bottom line is that lots of us aren’t as well-informed as we could be. A recent study published in PLOS One showed this by giving volunteers information about a school located where an aquifer was drying up.
School officials faced a decision: wait and hope for rain, or merge with another school. Participants got information either about one side of that debate, or both sides.
Volunteers who had been presented with an argument for just one side reported that they felt confident they had all the data they needed. The researchers called the phenomenon “the illusion of informational adequacy.”
They used as a familiar example a car stuck behind another car at a stop sign, the driver honking, not being able to see the pedestrian trying to cross.
As for current events, people aren’t getting the multi-perspective news that newspapers and some TV stations used to provide. Just seeing out-of-context headlines in a feed isn’t enough.
There’s still lots of high-quality information out there—we just need to take the time to find it. I asked a Trump supporter where he gets his information on immigration and other issues.
He told me he doesn’t have time to read or to watch TV news. Instead, he listens to long podcasts while he’s working; his favourite is the Shawn Ryan show, which is the third-most popular podcast in the US, a little behind Joe Rogan.
When I suggested reading , he responded as if I’d suggested getting news from a stone tablet. So I gave Shawn Ryan a try, choosing a podcast about censorship. The guest didn’t present a viewpoint. It was all innuendo and an alleged insider view of a “censorship-industrial complex.”
In the school experiment, the volunteers became less wedded to their views once presented with the other side, and they also became less confident that they had a full understanding of the issue. Seeing other sides of a story makes us more thoughtful and humble. Too bad so many of us won’t spare the time. ©bloomberg
