Brendan Nyhan

From my new column at Medium:

Just as physicists spend decades seeking to resolve the seeming paradox that a photon is both a wave and a particle, observers of U.S. politics continue to struggle with the reality that Donald Trump is both an exceptionally weak president and an authoritarian threat. Since 2017, many commentators have treated this question as binary, suggesting that Trump’s failures as a president should invalidate any concerns over what his White House tenure might mean for the future of our democracy. But that’s an incorrect — and dangerous — assumption.

From my new Medium column:

With the 2020 presidential campaign officially underway, the worst excesses of political reporting are once again rearing their ugly heads — most notably, the media’s preoccupation with candidates’ authenticity, an obsession that has marred so many recent presidential campaigns. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand became the latest victim of the authenticity police on Saturday, after she had the audacity to ask whether it was appropriate to use her fingers or a fork to eat the fried chicken she was served at a women’s brunch in South Carolina.

New York’s Frank Rich asked on Twitter, “Is there anything Gillibrand has done that is not contrived and opportunistic? I ask the question seriously. Replies welcome.” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni went further, writing that “you got the sense that she would have grabbed that chicken with her pinkie toes if she’d been told to… Anything to conform. Anything to please.”

The incident, just the latest entry in the growing pantheon of political food gaffes, reveals how the media too often covers presidential candidates on the trail. With most candidates’ speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate’s strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate’s personality.

From my new column:

After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: “fake news.” False or misleading information published by dubious for-profit websites had spread widely on Facebook, reaching millions of people in the final months of the campaign. This development provided a tidy narrative that resonated with concerns about potential online echo chambers.

More than two years later, we can now evaluate these claims. And it turns out that many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.

The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people’s broader concerns about social media and the internet.

Many important concerns about online misinformation still remain, including the influence of the fake news audience, the difficulty of countering fake news at scale, the dangers of Facebook’s size, and the threat of YouTube-based radicalization. But none of these questions can be adequately addressed without creating a reality-based debate that puts fake news in context as just one of the many sources of misinformation in our politics.

From my new report with Andy Guess, Ben Lyons, Jacob Montgomery, and Jason Reifler:

Concern has grown since the 2016 presidential election about the prevalence of misinformation in American politics and the ways social media has potentially exacerbated its reach and influence. In this report, we assess the quality and quantity of information flows during the 2018 midterm election campaign, focusing specifically on two new forms of media – “fake news” and political ads on Facebook. First, we examine visits to fake news websites. We find a substantial decline in the proportion of Americans who visited at least one fake news website in 2018 relative to 2016. However, evidence is mixed on changes in the average share of people’s information diets that comes from fake news websites. Our data also reveal that exposure to political ads on Facebook was limited relative to other types of advertising and concentrated among a subset of targeted users who frequently use Facebook. Finally, we provide new evidence of how frequently Americans believe fake and hyperpartisan news as well as misperceptions promoted by elites that circulated on social media during the campaign.

From my new column co-authored with Patrick Ball:

Since “fake news” rose to prominence during and after the 2016 election, the United States and countries around the world have struggled to determine how to most effectively address political misinformation. Though critics’ worst fears about the influence of online misinformation are likely overstated, false or misleading political claims are being amplified by platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, deceiving voters and distorting public debate on an unprecedented scale.

As a result, these firms have faced increasing scrutiny from Congress and the media. However, calls for reform are increasingly coming not just from politics and journalism but from employees of the platforms themselves, the skilled computer engineers and managers who are Big Tech’s most scarce – and thus most valuable – resource. For that reason, technologists could be a critical ally in the fight against online misinformation.

This article was published as part of Defusing Disinfo, a project of the Stand Up Republic Foundation.

We published two new reports today at Bright Line Watch:
–Wave 7 Report – new expert and public ratings of the state of U.S. democracy in October 2018
–Party, policy, democracy and candidate choice in U.S. elections – a new study estimating the effects of candidate support for democratic principles on vote choice

From my new column:

Intweets and campaign rallies in recent days, President Trump has returned to his signature cause of immigration, inveighing against drug traffickers and a caravan of immigrants.

Trump’s strategy makes perfect sense politically. He hopes to prod the Republican base to turn out in the midterms in November. One of the most effective ways to motivate political action is to stoke fears among your supporters.

Strikingly, however, public opinion data suggest that Trump has failed to convince the public on immigration and has even helped to turn the public against his positions — an effect that may grow stronger as his anti-immigration campaign intensifies.

From my new Monkey Cage post on the potential consequences of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination for public attitudes toward the Supreme Court:

Could Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination undermine the public standing of the Supreme Court? Observers such as the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein think so. “Every time [Chief Justice John] Roberts would lean on Kavanaugh to construct a majority,” Brownstein writes, “the chief justice could further erode the Court’s already eroding public confidence.”

In general, public support for the court tends to be relatively stable. But this time could be different. Increased ideological and partisan divisions and pressure from the #MeToo movement could dent the court’s image, especially since the coalition backing the prospective new justice has such narrow support.

My 2017 essay for Document Journal on information overload is now online:

Critics of democracy have long lamented that people know too little about politics, but today we have more news and information available to us than at any moment in history.

I, for instance, start and end my days with Twitter: The ongoing stream of information it provides about the world is a relentless and sometimes oppressive presence in my life. Even my less politically obsessed friends and family members now find that the news has become an ongoing part of their days via the Facebook posts, push alerts, and other manners information finds its way to the devices and screens that surround us.

They aren’t unique. According to a study from Pew Research Center in July 2016, 38 percent of American adults say they often get their news online. In particular, more than seven in 10 people get some of this information on their mobile devices, which have brought the news into parts of our day to day lives where it used to be largely invisible. Similarly, nearly 60 percent of adults say they often or sometimes watch cable news, which increasingly permeates common spaces like airports and coffee shops, making the news harder to escape even if we do not seek it out.

At a personal level, these trends can be discomforting. Surveys sponsored by the American Psychological Association found that people who frequently check online information sources are especially stressed. Though it is impossible to separate cause and effect in these data, it is noteworthy that approximately four in 10 of those “constant checkers” cite political and cultural controversies as a specific cause of stress. Overall, 57 percent of Americans report that the political climate is very or somewhat stressful. What is understood even less is how this deluge of information is affecting our lives as citizens. Are we truly better informed? Or are we becoming a nation of political amnesiacs, stumbling blindly from one breaking news event and meme to the next?

The key results from our July expert and public surveys:

• American democracy is continuing to erode. Our expert respondents perceive a consistent, ongoing decline in the overall quality of American democracy from 2015 (assessed retrospectively) to our first expert survey in February 2017 and over the five subsequent surveys we have conducted since then.
• Public ratings of the quality of American democracy are continuing to polarize. Notably, those who disapprove of Trump report ongoing democratic erosion. However, those who approve of the president perceive the quality of democracy to have improved measurably during this period.
• Across a range of measures, President Trump’s supporters and his detractors are drawing conclusions about democracy that are not merely disconnected, but are often antithetical to each other.
• A number of recent political events are characterized by experts as both highly abnormal and important.

Read the report for more, including some striking graphs.