Data shows who was reading “fake news” before 2016 US election

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Partisan misinformation online is at least in part a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. There's the supply on one side, coming in part from politically motivated websites indistinguishable from propaganda but also from some who are just trying to make a buck bringing in clicks with fake headlines. But there's also the demand to consider-those people voraciously surfing to sate their hunger for bias-confirming outrage. To understand the extent of the problem, it helps to look at both sides of this relationship. What misinformation is floating around, and who is consuming it?

In a new study, Andy Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler took advantage of survey data tracking the Web histories of around 2,500 people in the month before the 2016 US election. Combined with some demographic survey data on things like their preferred candidate for president, the researchers were able to break down who was reading which articles.

Who publishes what

The researchers relied on a previous study's list of "untrustworthy" sites. This included several hundred that could be fairly described as fake but also over a hundred that run afoul of fact-checkers and were determined to lack editorial standards. Among that list are conspiracy-spreading sites like InfoWars and Natural News, hyperpartisan sites like Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, and even some tabloids like The Express.

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