Selective exposure to misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tendencies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news websites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers. We are grateful to the Poynter Institute, Knight Foundation, and American Press Institute for generous funding support; Craig Silverman for graciously sharing data; Samantha Luks and Marissa Shih at YouGov for assistance with survey administration; and Kevin Arceneaux, Travis Coan, David Ciuk, Lorien Jasny, David Lazer, Thomas Leeper, Adam Seth Levine, Ben Lyons, Cecilia Mo, Simon Munzert, and Spencer Piston for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Angela Cai, Jack Davidson, Kathryn Fuhs, Jose Burnes Garza, Guy Green, Jessica Lu, Annie Ma, Sarah Petroni, Morgan Sandhu, Priya Sankar, Amy Sun, Andrew Wol↵, and Alexandra Woodru↵ for excellent research assistance. Reifler received funding support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 682758). The combination of rising partisanship and pervasive social media usage in the United States have created fears of widespread “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” (Sunstein, 2001; Pariser, 2011). To date, these warnings appear to be overstated. Behavioral data indicates that only a subset of Americans have heavily skewed media consumption patterns (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2011; Barberá et al., 2015; Flaxman, Goel, and Rao, 2016; Guess, 2016). However, the risk of information polarization remains. Research shows people tend to prefer congenial information, including political news, when given the choice (e.g., Stroud, 2008; Hart et al., 2009; Iyengar and Hahn, 2009; Iyengar et al., 2008), but these studies typically focus on how ideological slant a↵ects the content people choose to consume; relatively little is known about how selective exposure extends to false or misleading factual claims. Research in political science and psychology has documented that misperceptions are often systematically related to people’s political identities and predispositions (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler, 2017). In this article, we therefore evaluate whether people di↵erentially consume false information that reinforces their political views as theories of selective exposure would predict. We additionally consider the extent to which social media usage exacerbates tendencies toward selective exposure to misinformation. Though Messing and Westwood (2014) find that social endorsements can help overcome partisan cues when people are choosing news content, other research indicates that tendencies toward selective exposure to attitude-consistent news and information may be exacerbated by the process of sharing and consuming content online (e.g., Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic, 2015). In this way, social media consumption may also be a mechanism increasing di↵erential exposure to factually dubious but attitude-consistent information. Finally, we analyze whether fact-checking — a new format that is increasingly used to counter political misinformation — e↵ectively reached consumers of fake news during the 2016 election. Though fact-checks are relatively widely read and associated with greater political knowledge (e.g., Gottfried et al., 2013), they are often disseminated online in a politically slanted manner that is likely to increase selective exposure and reduce consumption of counter-attitudinal fact-checks (Shin and Thorson, 2017). To date, however, no previous research has considered whether consumers of fact-checks have been exposed to the claims that they evaluate. Does selective exposure undermine the e↵ectiveness of fact-checking? We evaluate these questions in the context of the rise of so-called “fake news,” a new form