Misinformation Online: A Preliminary Review of Survey Results on Americans' Perceptions by Gender, Ethnicity, and Party Affiliation.

• Author: Belhadjali, Moncef

INTRODUCTION

Lately, according to a CNN online report, President Trump had a fake Time magazine cover hanging in at least five of his golf clubs (CNN 6/28/2017). Newsweek (5/24/2017) reported that two thirds of Americans think that the mainstream media publishes fake news. In addition, a Harvard-Harris poll revealed that 53% of Democrats, 80% of Republicans, and 60% of Independent voters believe that the news media publishes stories that are not true. The term "Fake News" became a popular buzzword, especially during the last presidential campaign. Volumes of political news were uploaded and shared daily through social media sites and other online news outlets. It is important to take a closer look at this phenomenon, especially since about 4 in 10 Americans obtain their news online (Mitchell et al., 2016). This ratio is higher (50%) for younger adults ages 18-29. During the early days of the Trump administration, 89% of Democrats said that news media criticism keeps leaders in line, while only 42% of Republicans felt the same (Barther & Mitchell, 2017). It was reported, in a recent study, that there is evidence that 62% of adults in the USA get their news from social media and the most popular fake news stories are shared through Facebook (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). A survey in the United Kingdom (digiday.com, 2/7/2017) found only 4% of those surveyed were able to correctly identify a story by the headline and that men identified more stories correctly as true or false. The site digiday.com/uk reported that 49% of Brits surveyed are confident that they can distinguish between fake news and real news stories. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center (Barthel et al., 2016), 84% of Americans surveyed are confident that they can recognize made up news. This same survey found that 16% shared political news that they later found out was made up, and 14% shared news knowing that it was made up. The purpose of this paper is to investigate certain aspects of fake news stories, such as the perceptions of users as to their impact on others and the degree of responsibility of different players.

METHODOLOGY

Data

The data used in this study were downloaded from the datasets available through the Pew Research Center (http://www.pewinternet.org). This dataset, collected December 2016, includes more than 1000 records and uses at least 24 variables. The sample includes adults, 18 years of age or older, living in the continental United States. The interviews were conducted by phone in English and Spanish. The combined landline and cellphone sample were weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race...