Fake news and fact checking: Getting the facts straight may not be enough to change minds

a column by Oscar Barrera, Sergei Guriev, Emeric Henry and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

‘Fake news’ has become a key ingredient of Western political discourse. This column uses an experiment conducted during the 2017 French presidential election campaign to show that ‘alternative facts’ are highly persuasive. Voters exposed to a narrative based on misleading numbers shifted towards the populist’s agenda, and fact checking did nothing to undo these effects. In fact, exposing voters only to official facts on a highly sensitive subject, such as the European refugee crisis, can backfire by increasing support for the extreme right.

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