President Donald Trump (Photo : Donald J. Trump/Twitter)
Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow and Hunt Allcott of New York University released that social media "fake news" caused little impact on the 2016 US Presidential Election. Circulating unestablished stories reached a small fraction of Americans.
There is a strong disagreement from Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg with the reports that social media became the medium of fabrication with the events of the US Election. However, the data shows fifteen percent of people who claimed to have seen fake news on the internet with over eight percent of which believes its legitimacy.
On determining recession of the United States Economic value, fake news marked as a remarkable factor in the economy based on the National Bureau of Economic Research published remarks by Gentzkow and Allcott. The 1,208 online sample survey turned out from adult Americans conducted Nov 28, three weeks after the US Election.
There are over 30 million shares from people supporting President-elect Donald Trump and 7.6 million supporting former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"For fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake news story would need to have convinced about 0.7 percent of Clinton voters and non-voters who saw it shift their votes to Trump, a persuasion rate equivalent to seeing 36 television campaign ads," the research determined as noted on the News Phys.
This means that even if fake news came out excessively, it is not considered as an important source. The leading source came from cable TV, followed second by network TV, then news websites, and the local television. Social Media came out as the fifth source, as published online on the News Stanford.
"A reader of our study could very reasonably say, based on our set of facts, that it is unlikely that fake news swayed the election. But that conclusion ultimately depends on what readers think is a reasonable benchmark for the persuasiveness of an individual fake news story," Gentzkow said.
During the campaign, platforms from Facebook and other social media were subject to different criticism with the different malicious news. Facebook took the necessary measures to protect their users and further prove that tolerance of fake news is not given.
The US election is not the only time that social media is panned with controversies.This is the point of the National Bureau of Economic Research that fake news is just factors that don't affect the voting population behavior.
