Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

The Numbers Are In: Fake News Didn't Work

New research shows fake news stories on the social networks probably had little effect on voters in 2016.

January 23, 2017 at 5:37 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

The revolution must be televised, as it turns out.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Volumes have been written in the media about the effect of fake news on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Facebook has been pressured to crack down on fake stories in the U.S. and other countries where important elections are taking place this year. It's rolling out its cooperation scheme with fact-checkers in Germany in the coming weeks. Google has taken steps to discourage spurious news sites. And President Donald Trump himself has adopted the catchphrase "fake news" for his anti-media screeds on Twitter and at his news conferences. But there have been no serious attempts to quantify the actual influence of fake news stories on how people voted last November until Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford published a fresh paper.

QuickTake Fake News, Trump and the Pressure on Facebook