CEREN BUDAK, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SCHOOL OF INFORMATION
The spread of political misinformation threatens the health of our democracies and weakens the legitimacy and public trust in the established political and media institutions. In this talk I will examine the spread of this threat, focusing primarily on the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections and by providing some preliminary analysis from 2020. I will present findings about the prevalence and focus of such content, how its prevalence changed over time, and how this prevalence related to important election dynamics using social media, news media, and interview data. These datasets allow us to examine the interplay between news media production and consumption, social media behaviour, and the information the electorate retained about the presidential candidates leading up to the election.