By Donna Lu

Richard Levine / Alamy

Fake news was widely cited as a problem during the 2016 US election, but a new analysis suggests that, at least in that country, it may not affect public opinion as much as has been suggested.

Duncan Watts at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues analysed the daily media consumption habits of people in the US and found that deliberately false or misleading content makes up only a tiny fraction of what people watch or read.

Watts and his colleagues found that, on average, people consumed fake news for 0.15 per cent of the total time they spent watching TV and movies or gaming, using social media and enjoying other such entertainment.

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They suggest that conventional news sources, or people avoiding the news altogether, may be greater contributors to the polarisation of opinions and creating a misinformed public than fake news.

The team analysed data from Nielsen, a company that measures the TV viewing habits of about 100,000 people in the US to determine ratings. The team also studied nationally representative data from analytics firm Comscore, which measures the time people spend on their computers and mobile phones on different media websites.

Fake news consumption was defined as the amount of time people spent on any of 98 websites that had previously been identified by fact-checkers as deceptive, low-quality or hyper-partisan.

The researchers found that people in the US spend an average of over 7.5 hours a day consuming media. News comprises 14 per cent of this.

People spend about five times more time consuming news on TV 54 minutes than online, although this ratio was smaller for 18- to 24-year-olds.

The media plays a tremendously important role in questions about politics, public opinion, polarisation and attitudes towards experts, says Watts.

News publishers and programmes should be held as accountable as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, he says.

Journal reference: Science Advances

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There probably isn't as much fake news in the media as we think - New Scientist News