In the run-up to the 2020 election, people appear to have become savvier in spotting misinformation online: clicks onto unreliable websites have declined, according to a new Stanford study published April 13 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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According to prior research, some 44.3 percent of Americans visited websites during the 2016 U.S. election that repeatedly made false or misleading information. During the 2020 election, Stanford scholars saw that number drop by nearly half to 26.2 percent.
While these findings are promising, the scholars are cautious in interpreting the study’s results. Exposure even among fewer people can still have serious consequences, they noted in the paper. Extrapolating their results, the scholars estimated that nearly 68 million Americans made a total of 1.5 billion visits to untrustworthy websites during the 2020 election.
“Although we saw a serious reduction in the overall number of people exposed to misinformation on the web, misinformation remains a serious problem in the information ecosystem for some populations, especially older adults and diverse communities,” said Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the study.
The scholars found that those who did visit websites touting false claims tended to be older and lean more to the right of the political spectrum, a finding consistent with 2016 data. They did however visit fewer...
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