{"id":278,"date":"2017-04-15T13:33:39","date_gmt":"2017-04-15T12:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=278"},"modified":"2019-03-28T09:19:01","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T09:19:01","slug":"stats-in-the-news-2-who-reads-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/stats-in-the-news-2-who-reads-fake-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Stats in the News #2 – Who reads fake news?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fake news has entered the political dictionary over the last year.\u00a0 Suddenly, politicians and commentators are worried that elections are\u00a0being influenced by false stories being circulated that appear to be genuine.\u00a0 Social media platforms are under pressure to filter out such stories raising the old questions of censorship and “who guards the guards?”\u00a0 However, evidence on the extent and influence of fake news is thin on the ground.<\/p>\n

A recent article from the BBC website “The rise of left wing, anti-Trump\u00a0fake news”<\/a> has provided some firmer evidence which I think makes a good case study for my evidence hierarchy or circle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let’s start at the beginning and try and\u00a0unpick the fake news issue.\u00a0 I think there are\u00a0a few\u00a0facts we can always agree on.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Fake news have always provided a rich vein of comic material and general entertainment.\u00a0 Think of April Fool’s day, The Onion, The Daily Mash, National Enquirer, Sunday Sport, etc.<\/li>\n
  2. Fake news have always existed since the printing press was invented.\u00a0 Journalists & editors\u00a0are human after all so they are just as capable of lying like the rest of us.<\/li>\n
  3. The internet makes it easier these days to distribute fake news.<\/li>\n
  4. Fake news is not the same thing as slanting and twisting the facts which has existed since year dot.<\/li>\n
  5. Fake news can be bracketed with conspiracy theories which again have existed since year dot.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So if we assume that there is more fake news around these days, what questions would we want answers to?\u00a0 My list includes –<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. What % of the population have read fake news?<\/li>\n
    2. What % of fake news readers are taken in by the fake news?<\/li>\n
    3. What % of fake news readers who believe the fake news\u00a0change their voting behaviour?<\/li>\n
    4. What % of fake news readers who don’t believe the fake news change their voting behaviour?<\/li>\n
    5. What are the demographics and political breakdowns for all 3 questions?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      To my mind, question 3 is the critical one since if it can be proven that a significant proportion of\u00a0people change their voting behaviour as result of believing fake news then clearly this is a problem for a democracy.\u00a0 If so, the natural follow up question is who are these people as per question 5?\u00a0 However, question 4 does need\u00a0asking as well.\u00a0 A case\u00a0can be made\u00a0that supporters of a side who indulge in fake news might be disgusted enough by the behaviour to not vote or vote for the other side (think of Republicans put off by “Obama is a Muslim” conspiracy theories).\u00a0 If so, then, fake news might actually be self defeating if for every voter you attract to your side through fake news, you end up losing a voter who is turned off by your antics.<\/p>\n

      Let’s now apply my evidence hierarchy<\/a> to these questions:<\/p>\n

      BELIEFS<\/strong><\/p>\n

      When fake news emerged last year, I think it is fair to say most people believed it was an issue for the right-wing in politics.\u00a0 Words like Alt-Right, comments made by Donald Trump, features on Fox News would have together left you with the impression that it was the right who were guilty of creating fake news.\u00a0 Furthermore, when it came to the readers and voters, the general assumption was that ignorant and uneducated people would be taken in by fake news and were more likely to vote for right wing parties as a result.\u00a0 This article in The Independent describing an FBI investigation into news sites like Breitbart <\/a>quotes a lot of unnamed sources and is probably typical of articles describing the writer’s belief that fake news is an issue for the right.<\/p>\n

      ANECDOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Anecdotes about specific articles shown to be fake abound in the news.\u00a0 In December 2016, The Guardian published\u00a0a list of articles\u00a0shown to be fake from a number of countries <\/a>around the world.\u00a0 Whilst what passes for left and right varies around the world, it is fair to say that most of the fake news listed here were intended to be detrimental to left wing or centrist candidates.\u00a0 This would support the common narrative we see about fake news.<\/p>\n

      However, listing examples is not sufficient to answer the questions I posed.\u00a0 All anecdotes do is verify that a problem exists but anecdotes are not capable of quantifying the extent and seriousness of the problem.<\/p>\n

      OBSERVATIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n

      To get a handle on the extent of the problem as per my first question, we need someone to systematically track and verify the veracity of news stories over time.\u00a0 According the BBC article I quote at the beginning, the fact checking site Snopes<\/a> has been doing this to some degree.\u00a0 This is not the same as counting all articles over time but by attempting to verify a wide variety of articles over time, they have observed that fake news favourable to the left has outnumbered fake news favourable to the right in the last week.\u00a0 Clearly this differs from the standard narrative that the right is more responsible for fake news.<\/p>\n

      It is clear though that answering question 1 is going to be hard.\u00a0 The only way to do this with any statistical rigour is to select a random sample of articles on a particular day and verify the accuracy of each article.\u00a0 The sample design would have to take into account the nature of the publisher of the article e.g. newspaper, TV channel, social media, personal blog, etc and would also need to account for the volume of readers.\u00a0 With web articles, Google Analytics would provide that data but print articles would be harder to verify the readership.\u00a0 This points to another issue with question 1.\u00a0 One might be able to estimate the % of articles read that constitute fake news but it is much harder to answer how many people actually read the fake news article and who those people were as per question 5.<\/p>\n

      EXPERIMENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

      What caught my eye about the BBC article was the description of a small experiment carried out by an American advertising company\u00a0commissioned by CBS who in turn are producing a documentary to answer some of my 5 questions.\u00a0 The experiment involved creating two fake news articles, the first about a supposed police raid on some protestors (deemed to be favourable to the left), the second about a supposed congressional plot to unseat Trump (deemed to be favourable to the right).\u00a0 These articles were then published (where was not stated) and the company then tracked who was reading and who was sharing these articles.<\/p>\n

      Their conclusions completely contradict the standard narrative.\u00a0 Specifically,<\/p>\n