By Clara H. Suong
As the election cycle in the U.S. entered its final stretches, many personae non gratae have emerged, aiming to influence the election at the last minute by spreading political misinformation and disinformation. They include the Russian government and the individuals and groups it sponsored, such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). They are allegedly waging political disinformation campaigns targeting the upcoming U.S. election, intended to spread disinformation, sow divisions among the U.S. electorate, affect the electoral outcome, and ultimately degrade the democratic system.
And this is not the first time for these foreign powers to (try to) intervene in U.S. elections. In particular, the Russian government has been accused of waging disinformation campaigns that targeted the 2016 U.S. election (in addition to launching cyberattacks against the U.S. election infrastructure).
While these campaigns are extremely concerning, it is worthwhile to reexamine underlying assumptions about them. In particular, it is important to learn from the turn of events in 2016 and distinguish what happened from what did not, according to the existing political science research.
This post will examine common misperceptions about political misinformation and disinformation in the context of existing political science research. It will then discuss what this strand of literature implies about the upcoming U.S. election.
Common misperceptions about fake news and the Russian disinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. election can be summarized include those about citizens’ level of informativeness, their exposure to disinformation, and its effect on the electoral outcome.
Misperception 1: The emergence of political misinformation and disinformation is a new phenomenon.
The first commonly held misperception is that fake news, political misinformation and disinformation have recently emerged. Notwithstanding the long history of fake news in the U.S., political misinformation has always existed among the U.S. electorate. Citizens often lack the time and motivation to obtain political information, opting to use heuristics (or informational short-cuts), such as cues from elites with shared preferences (e.g. opinions of co-partisan elites), when engaging with politics (e.g. Zaller 1992). Scholars have lamented about how uninformed citizens are, how their political ignorance results in a democratic dilemma (e.g. Lupia 2015).
Salient examples include exaggerated perceptions about the generosity of U.S. federal welfare and foreign aid. For instance, a representative survey of Illinois residents conducted in the late 1990s found that fewer than one in ten respondents knew that welfare spending amounts to less than 1% of the federal budget (Kuklinski et al. 2000). Another well-known example is the public’s misperception about foreign aid. Many people believe that it is much larger than it actually is. A 2016 nationwide poll found that Americans on average estimated that 31% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid and that only three in 100 know the correct answer of less than 1% (DiJulio et al. 2016).
Misperception 2: Political disinformation on social media affected many U.S. voters.
Another common misperception is that political disinformation reached many Americans via social media during the 2016 election. In particular, Americans worried that disinformation spread by the various fake news sources reached many far and wide in 2016. A Pew poll found that “a third (32%) of Americans [said] they often see political news stories online that are made up.”
However, this is unlikely to be true. Political scientists have yet to find definitive evidence that fake news reached a wide audience among U.S. voters. In contrast, researchers found that most political news that American users on Twitter and Facebook were exposed to still came from mainstream media outlets. For example, Grinberg et al. (2019) found in their analysis of tweets sent by the 16,442 accounts that were active from August 1 to December 6, 2016 that “engagement with fake news sources was extremely concentrated” and that “only 1% of users were exposed to 80% of fake news, and 0.1% of users were responsible for sharing 80% of fake news” (374). Similarly, political scientists have found sharing fake news on Facebook “was a relatively rare activity” in their analysis of a panel survey of 3500 respondents and their 1331 Facebook accounts and activities in 2016 (Guess et al. 2019, 1). Both studies found that engagement with fake news was concentrated among conservative-leaning and older individuals.
Misperception 3: The Russian disinformation campaign changed the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election.
There is also little evidence that the Russian disinformation campaign affected political attitudes of U.S. voters, let alone their votes, in the 2016 election. For instance, a study that analyzed 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users and Twitter activities of the IRA, found no evidence that interaction with IRA Twitter accounts substantially impacted political attitudes and behaviors during the 2016 election. Despite the IRA’s extensive efforts in 2016, which “produced more than 57,000 Twitter posts, 2,400 Facebook posts, and 2,600 Instagram posts”, the IRA failed to persuade Twitter users; the disinformation campaign did not affect their attitudes toward the Democratic Party and GOP or political ideology (Bail et al. 2020, 243). Researchers argued the IRA efforts may have failed because it mostly interacted with American Twitter users who were already polarized. They found that IRA reached mostly Twitter users “with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage” (Bail et al. 2020, 243).
Of course, these null or limited effects of fake news on politics during the 2016 U.S. election does not imply that we should drop our guard against it this election season. The volume of political disinformation has greatly increased this election season, compared to 2016. Recent studies have found that fake news is more popular now than in 2016; the level of engagement with articles from fake news sources has increased 102 percent since the run-up to the 2016 election (Kornbluh et al. 2020). This may lead to a greater political impact of fake news on politics this year.