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Study: Fake News Had Virtually No Effect On Election

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NewsHubA recent study indicates that so-called “fake news” had very little, if any, effect on the 2016 election results.
The study , undertook by Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University, concluded that only 14 percent of Americans surveyed say social media is their “most important” source of election news.
The abstract of the study also reads, in part:
“(iii) the average American saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with just over half of those who recalled seeing fake news stories believing them; (iv) for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads”
Another sentence in the study reads, “Our confidence intervals rule out that the average voting-age American saw, remembered, and believed more than 0.71 pro-Trump fake stories and 0.18 pro-Clinton fake stories.”
In other words, the average voter believed less than one pro-Trump fake story. This incredibly small figure seems to contradict the narrative presented by many liberal commentators last November after Donald Trump’s victory that he was actually elected because masses of voters believed pro-Trump “fake news.” Facebook is attempting to find a “solution” to this “problem.”
In December, Hillary Clinton reemerged to speak up on the “epidemic” that is fake news, calling for Congress to take action against it.
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