Ever since Brexit and Trump took the political establishment by surprise, its representatives have been claiming that we are living in a “post-truth” world, where facts and experts are no longer trusted, and information is dominated by “fake news”. This is an understandable, if self-serving, coping mechanism of liberals and establishment conservatives to deal with their shocking loss of political power. It is also simplistic and self-defeating.

Let’s look at the evidence.

At first sight, recent studies seem to provide a solid basis for the popular assertion that populism and fake news are closely connected, and have therefore been widely cited in the media. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) found that “on Twitter, a network of Trump supporters shares the widest range of junk news and circulates more junk news than all other political audience groups combined”.

Similarly, on Facebook, “extreme hard right pages – distinct from Republican pages – both share the widest range and circulate the largest volume of junk news compared with all the other audiences”.

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This is in line with another recent study, by a group of US scholars, who found that “approximately one in four Americans visited a fake news website” in their five-week period of study around the time of the 2016 presidential elections. Moreover, they established that “fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost six in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets”.

While these studies paint a disturbing picture of news consumption in the United States, they are much more nuanced than much of the debate on “fake news” and “post-truth” would suggest.

First of all, fake news is mostly consumed by just one part of the electorate, which constitutes only a minority of the population. In fact, as Professor Phil Howard, director of the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford, said: “There is an upside to all of this. It appears that only one part of the political spectrum – the far right – is really the target for extremist, sensational and conspiratorial content. Over social media, moderates and centrists tend not to be as susceptible.”

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Second, the impact of “fake news” is even debated for the “far right” group, which itself constitutes only a subset of the Trump electorate. As the US scholars found in their study, even among pro-Trump users “false stories were a small fraction of the participants’ overall news diet”.

In other words, most people who consume fake news, consume “real” news too, and much more of it. And the ones who consume the most fake news, as Professor Brendan Nyhan explained, tend to be the “intense partisans,” which, according to decades of political communication research, are the least impressionable. They look for “fake news” because it confirms their strong beliefs, not because it creates them.

In conclusion, the vast majority of people do not consume fake news, and of the minority that does, the vast majority consume much more real news too. As far as fake news does play a role, it is in providing legitimacy and support to long-held views by a relatively small group of intense, far right partisans.

This should make us rethink some of the current responses to the exaggerated “fake news epidemic”.

First, the limited impact of fake news should make us very hesitant toward the adoption of repressive measure to fight fake news. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are under strong political and public pressure to fight fake news, while in Europe several countries are proposing new legislation to “ban” fake news altogether.

It is doubtful that this will have any positive effect, as the most affected population, the far right, “intense partisans,” will probably just see these measures as confirmation of their already held beliefs.

Moreover, given how vague the term “fake news” is, and how often real news turns out to be fake news, the measures are destined to become legal nightmare for liberal democracies, yet a powerful new repressive tools for authoritarian regimes – who can adopt them and argue that liberal democracies also have them.

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Second, the media should do a better job at offering meaningful journalism to people. Given that the vast majority of the electorate still get their news from the “mainstream media”, that means that if they are uninformed, that is the media’s fault. It doesn’t make sense to blame Russian disinformation campaigns, which reach only a minority of people.

Rather than make the news flashier and sexier to appease the partisan minority, the media should strive to be more accessible and informative for the non-partisan majority.

One of the first steps should be to stop fetishizing elite access and news scoops. Particularly national and White House correspondents of the mainstream media are obsessed about “access” to the “key players”, writing article after article on the basis of dubious, and often single, sources, which later turn out to have been biased at best and wrong at worst. Similarly, some news agencies, and in particular cable networks, seem to prioritize a partly wrong scoop over a fully correct non-scoop.

Because today, the biggest obstacle to having an informed electorate isn’t fake news but, rather, the ever more commercial, profit-seeking media seeking clicks and eyeballs at the expense of nuance, depth and on-the-ground reporting.

Cas Mudde is Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction and The Far Right in America

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