Reality check: Political polarization makes people fall for fake news
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Social scientists are baffled by mysterious forces pulling Americans into two contradictory versions of reality. In the reality inhabited by Republicans, Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 presidential election.
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.
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