Abstract
The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw an explosion in popularity for the term “fake news.” This phenomenon raises interesting questions: Which news sources do people believe are fake, and what do people think “fake news” means? One possibility is that beliefs about the news reflect a bias to disbelieve information that conflicts with existing beliefs and desires. If so, then news sources people consider “fake” might differ according to political affiliation. To test this idea, we asked people to tell us what “fake news” means, and to rate several news sources for the extent to which each provides real news, fake news, and propaganda. We found that political affiliation influenced people’s descriptions and their beliefs about which news sources are “fake.” These results have implications for people’s interpretations of news information and for the extent to which people can be misled by factually incorrect journalism.
Highlights
The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw an explosion in popularity for the term “fake news.”This phenomenon raises interesting questions: Which news sources do people believe are fake, and what do people think “fake news” means? One possibility is that beliefs about the news reflect a bias to disbelieve information that conflicts with existing beliefs and desires
In the analyses that follow, we found similar patterns of results when treating political identification as a continuous variable; our classifications here are for the sake of simplicity of interpretation
Real news ratings were once again negatively associated with fake news ratings and propaganda ratings, and fake news ratings were once again positively associated with propaganda ratings
Summary
The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw an explosion in popularity for the term “fake news.”This phenomenon raises interesting questions: Which news sources do people believe are fake, and what do people think “fake news” means? One possibility is that beliefs about the news reflect a bias to disbelieve information that conflicts with existing beliefs and desires. The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw an explosion in popularity for the term “fake news.”This phenomenon raises interesting questions: Which news sources do people believe are fake, and what do people think “fake news” means? News sources people consider “fake” might differ according to political affiliation. To test this idea, we asked people to tell us what “fake news” means, and to rate several news sources for the extent to which each provides real news, fake news, and propaganda. We found that political affiliation influenced people’s descriptions and their beliefs about which news sources are “fake.”These results have implications for people’s interpretations of news information and for the extent to which people can be misled by factually incorrect journalism
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