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Study Finds ‘Fake News’ Did Not Influence Presidential Election

According to a Stanford-NYU study, so called ‘fake news’ circulated on social media did not change the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. Releeased last month, the study entitled “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” NYU economics professor Hunt Allcott and Stanford economics professor Matthew Gentzkow conducted a series of tests to determine which ‘fake news’ articles were being circulated, how much they were shared and viewed, and what impact they had, if any, on voters. Allcott and Gentzkow say that the results suggest that television rather than social media was the largest medium for election ‘news’ sources “by a large margin.” RT reports: Allcott and Gentzkow conducted a 1,200-person post-election online survey and used previous studies and web browser data to conclude that social media was an important source of information, but it was not a dominant source of information. Their survey found only 14 percent of Americans viewed social media as their “most important” source of election news Allcott and Gentzkow tracked stories that were categorized as fake news by fact-checkers, and found that pro-Trump stories were shared over three times more than pro-Clinton articles. Pro-Trump stories were shared a total of 30 million times, compared [...]

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