F.D. Flam: America's political polarization is driving its hunger for fake news

Social scientists are baffled by the 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 election outcome, according to a survey released recently by the group Bright Line Watch. Moreover, 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 a third of Democrats say they believe the Trump assassination attempts were staged, and more than a third claim that JD Vance admitted in his book that he’d had sex with a couch.

Who is to blame for these 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 called “Misunderstanding the Harms of Online Misinformation.”

He said he thinks journalists and researchers may be overestimating the polarizing influence of misinformation. He and his coauthors referred to various studies published between 2016 and 2022 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 every day.

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 misinformation. 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, he said. And misinformation isn’t necessarily what’s pulling people into opposing versions of reality.

Some studies show polarization comes first. That motivates partisans to seek out and accept fake news that supports their side. Researchers might learn more by trying to study what’s at the root cause of the polarization.

The bottom line, though, is that lots of us aren’t as well-informed as we could be. People tend to assume they’re well-informed, even when they’re not. A recent study published in PLOS One demonstrated 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 received 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 information 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.

In the wider world of current events, people aren’t getting the kind of multi-perspective news that newspapers and some TV stations used to provide to diverse swaths of Americans. Just seeing out-of-context headlines in a feed isn’t enough to make a news consumer informed.

There’s still lots of high-quality information out there — we just need to take the time to find it. I recently asked a Trump supporter where he gets his information about immigration and other issues he cares strongly about. 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 favorite is the Shawn Ryan show, which is the third-most popular podcast in the country, only a little behind Joe Rogan. When I suggested that reading is a vastly quicker way of obtaining information than podcasts, he responded as if I’d suggested getting news from a stone tablet.

So I gave Shawn Ryan a try, choosing a segment about censorship — a topic I’ve researched for several columns. The guest didn’t present a viewpoint. It was all innuendo and an alleged insider view of a “censorship-industrial complex” hiding stuff “they” don’t want you to know. It wasn’t misinformation of the type that would fail a fact check — none of it was that concrete — but it was a very one-sided view.

In the experiment about the school facing a drought, the volunteers became less wedded to their views when subsequently 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 both more thoughtful and more humble. Too bad so many of us won’t spare the time.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

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