Why Fears of Fake News Are Overhyped – Reasonable Doubt – Medium

many of the initial conclusions ...about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets... no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election...
fake news consumption was concentrated among the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets... responsible for approximately six in 10 visits to fake news websites ... fake news made up less than 8 percent of their total news diet... people ages 60 and over consumed more fake news ...
the role of Facebook ... changed. In 2016, the site ... played a key role in enabling the spread of fake news. No such pattern is apparent in the 2018 data... suggests that the platform’s efforts to limit the reach of fake news are having some impact....
directionally motivated reasoning ...belief in the accuracy of headlines that favored respondents’ preferred party (17-48%) was much higher than headlines that favored the opposition party (10-22%)... People who score low on analytical thinking ability are especially prone to endorse false headlines...
no evidence that fake news changed the result of the 2016 election... [however] fake news consumers may be especially important in party politics, which is highly responsive to people with intense preferences who vote in primaries.. also likely to disseminate the information... indirectly exposing many more people...
fake news websites distort and demean public debate ... intensify the intense loathing that partisans increasingly feel... Facebook has created a dangerously alluring target that invites endless attacks from both fake news entrepreneurs and political opportunists... we are concentrating risk in a single closed platform....