Accomplished author, Jean Robert Revolus discusses the presidential elections, which took place in 2016 in his book, US Election 2016 NO COLLUSION? 978-1-95-163003-4. The results of the elections left the whole nation in disbelief. Republican candidate, Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States of America. The elections were one of the most dramatic and shocking events in American history. After associates of Hillary Clinton, Democratic candidate, and the DNC was hacked and personal emails were leaked on WikiLeaks, rumors of Russian interference began to swirl around. Several investigations began to find evidence of collusion and the involvement of the Russian government, which allegedly helped Donald Trump secure the win. It was said that the Russian government swung the results of the election by spreading fake news on giant social media platforms, like Facebook. Research conducted by Ohio State University shows how fake news probably played an important role in defaming Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign. Here is what the research found:
A massive number of political messages were disseminated through social media and news broadcasts during the 2016 election campaign. Many of them demonized candidates and seriously distorted the facts presented to voters. Among those dealing with the presidential race, the vast majority were pro-conservative comments hostile to Hillary Clinton.
What has not been clear, however, is how much of an impact, if any, these false “news” items had on the outcome of the election. To our knowledge, there have been no empirically-based studies that have systematically assessed the extent to which believing fake news stories actually influenced voting decisions in 2016. So we have used data from our nationwide post-election survey to address this crucial question.
Our analysis leads us to the conclusion that fake news most likely did have a substantial impact on the voting decisions of a strategically important set of voters—those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012.Indeed, given the very narrow margins of victory by Donald Trump in key battleground states, this impact may have been sufficient to deprive Hillary Clinton of avictory in the Electoral College.
We focus our analysis on the 2016 voting behavior of 585 respondents (of a total sample of 1,600) who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. This strategic subset of the electorate was selected for two reasons. First, restricting our analysis to former Obama supporters provides a form of control for other potentially confounding factors. It could not be argued, for example, that those who abandoned the Democratic candidate in 2016 were hostile to Democratic candidates, per se, or were implacable conservatives
More importantly, if Hillary Clinton had retained the support of these voters, she wouldmost likely have won the 2016 election. Instead, just 77 percent of those Obama voters supported Clinton. Our survey data show that 10 percent of them cast ballots for Trump in 2016, percent switched to minor parties, and 8 percent did not vote. Thus, our key research question is, what accounts for these defections?
Our post-election survey asked our respondents 281 questions that included, in addition to the standard election-survey items, three fake news statements. Two of these were negative statements about Hillary Clinton and one was a positive statement involving Donald Trump. All three were widely disseminated through the internet, twitter, and other devices and were picked up by the broadcast media as well.
The first is the claim that “Hillary Clinton is in very poor health due to a serious illness.” Twenty-five percent of all respondents in our nationally representative sample believed that this was “definitely true” or “probably true,” as did 12 percent of our former Obama supporters. The second is a statement that “Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president before the election.” About 10 percent of our national sample and 8 percent of Obama supporters thoughtthis statement was true. Finally, we asked our respondents if they believed that “During her time as U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton approved weapon sales to Islamic jihadists, including ISIS.” 35 percent of our national sample believed that Clinton had approved weapons sales to ISIS, as did 20 percent of former Obama voters. Belief in these fake news stories is very strongly linked to defection from the Democratic ticket by 2012 Obama voters.
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