Brief 85: How politicians’ claims of “fake news” undermine political accountability
EGAP researchers: Natalia Bueno
Other researchers: Kaylyn Jackson Schiff and Daniel S. Schiff
Key takeaways: Politicians who are facing a scandal can more effectively maintain voter support when they falsely allege that the story is “fake news,” rather than apologizing or remaining silent. This strategy is effective across voters from different parties, but is less successful when the scandal involves video evidence of wrongdoing.
Geographical Region: North America
Type of study: Survey experiment
Preparer: Mark Williamson
Executive Summary
This study seeks to understand whether politicians can exploit the rise of misinformation in recent years to falsely claim that a true scandal about themselves is “fake news.” This strategy, while detrimental to public trust in the media and informational ecosystem, can benefit politicians by sowing confusion about whether the story is authentic and by rallying their core supporters in their defense. The authors use a series of survey experiments with over 15,000 Americans in which participants learn about a real world scandal and are then randomly assigned to read several possible rebuttals from the embattled politician. They find that when politicians falsely claim misinformation, they are better able to maintain public support than when they adopt alternative strategies, like remaining silent or apologizing. This “liar’s dividend” pays off across partisan groups, including voters who don’t belong to the same party as the politician. Yet the effectiveness of crying fake news appears mostly limited to scandals described in text format, with participants remaining less convinced when presented with video evidence of the politician’s wrongdoing.
Policy Challenge
Misinformation – that is, false or inaccurate information, especially that which is intended to deceive audiences – has become a prominent feature of political life in countries around the world. According to a 2019 survey, almost nine out of every ten Americans say they often or sometimes come across made-up news. This problem appears to be exacerbated by technological developments in the past decade, namely the rise of social media and the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Generate AI models in particular can digitally alter or falsify audio, photos, and videos and generate realistic, but fake, text content that can then be shared widely online. So-called “deepfake” videos have been used to falsely show real politicians engaging in scandals or making offensive statements.
These developments pose a serious challenge to media organizations and technical experts, who have struggled to establish content which is truly authentic. But the rise of misinformation has also come with the emergence of a new tactic in political communication: politicians falsely claiming that true, but damaging stories about themselves are in fact falsified. This strategy of denial has perhaps been used most famously by U.S. President Donald Trump, but claims of “fake news” have been now repeated by leaders in Russia, Brazil, China, Turkey, Libya, Poland, Hungary, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, Syria, and Malaysia. In an era of increased uncertainty about what information can be trusted, this rhetoric has the potential to undermine political accountability and trust in media and democratic institutions.
Context
When politicians “cry wolf” over fake news and deepfakes, they might adopt one of two common rhetorical strategies. First, politicians can attempt to convince audiences that with the widespread proliferation of misinformation, they simply cannot trust everything they read or see online. Playing up the “informational uncertainty” of the current political context can make voters less likely to penalize politicians by undermining their confidence in the authenticity of content and in whether a given scandal or embarrassing story actually occurred.
Second, politicians can turn to high levels of polarization and inter-party animosity to rally supporters to their defense. When voters read or see negative news about a politician or party they support, they tend to experience feelings of cognitive dissonance as they grapple with whether they should continue their support. Politicians can exploit this discomfort by offering a convenient way to justify their original position: simply claiming the news is false, motivated by an ‘enemy’ of the politician. The allegation of fake news or a deepfake provides a reason for supporters to rally around the politician and disregard negative coverage, even if it is in fact true. In practice, this approach also implies that the embattled politician’s opponents are responsible for the lie, which also helps signal the malevolence of a rival politician or the media.
Research Design
The authors use a series of survey experiments to test how effective the “informational uncertainty” and “oppositional rallying” strategies described in the previous section are for politicians seeking to maintain support after a scandal. The five studies were pre-registered and administered to a total of over 15,000 American adults.
The experiments are all based around the same basic structure. Participants, irrespective of their political party, are first randomly assigned to learn about a real-world scandal involving either a Democrat or Republican politician who made statements that are inappropriate or embarrassing. In some studies, this information is provided as text (“fake news”) and in others, as videos (“deepfakes”).
After learning about the scandal, participants are then randomly assigned to read a short response by the politician. In one rebuttal, the politician invokes informational uncertainty, arguing that “you can’t know what’s true these days with so much misinformation out there.” In an alternative response, the politician uses an oppositional rallying strategy to argue that story is a misleading attack by a political opponent (e.g. “my opponents would say anything to hurt me, but my supporters know who’s really on their side”). The authors then compare these rebuttals against more traditional strategies, like denial, remaining silent, or apologizing.
Finally, participants answer a series of questions about their belief in the truthfulness of the story, their support for the politician, and their trust in media.
Results
The authors begin their analyses by testing for whether politicians do in fact receive a “liar’s dividend,” or a benefit from falsely alleging misinformation. To do so, they first compare the average support for politicians that were the subject of the scandal among participants who read a claim of misinformation from the politician versus those who did not see any rebuttal from the politician.
Overall, the “fake news” strategy is highly effective: when exposed to their claims of misinformation, participants registered much greater support for the relevant politician compared to when the politician remained silent. The effects are of roughly the same magnitude regardless of whether the politician’s misinformation claim attempts to sow doubt about the current media environment (i.e. informational uncertainty) or tries to blame an opponent for spreading falsehoods (i.e. oppositional rallying). Moreover, the effects are broadly effective across partisan groups, meaning that even Democrats were swayed by Republican politicians’ claims of misinformation, and vice versa. The sizes of the observed differences in support are also substantively meaningful. In one of the studies, for example, around 44% of participants who did not hear a rebuttal from the politician said they would not support them; among those who read about their claims of misinformation, that figure is just 32 to 34%.
In a follow-up test, the authors examine how claims of fake news compare against other possible strategies politicians might adopt. They find that alleging misinformation is only marginally more effective for maintaining voter support than simply denying that the scandal ever happened. But casting doubt on the truthfulness of the story does offer a significant advantage over directly apologizing. This result reveals a perverse incentive for politicians caught in a scandal: owning up to one’s mistake can help bolster the public’s trust in the current media environment to accurately report on politicians, but misleading voters offers the more promising way to maintain political support.
Interestingly, in two of the authors’ experiments, respondents were randomly assigned to learn about the scandal through either text-based or video evidence. Politicians’ claims of misinformation were generally only effective against textual reports, but not against videos (with one exception in their fourth experiment). This finding offers some reassurance that the increased prevalence of “deepfake” videos in recent years has not undermined voters’ trust in authentic video content, although the authors caution that the studies were conducted before the popularization of generative AI and more accessible and compelling deepfake-creation technologies.
Across the various studies, crying fake news does not appear to consistently reduce whether people actually believe in the scandal, although this depends slightly on how beliefs are measured. The experimental treatments also do not appear to reduce trust in the media, which might be explained by low baseline levels of trust among the American public. (In the authors’ sample, just 23 to 33% of participants who were exposed to the scandal but saw no misinformation claims indicated that they trust the media).
Lessons
This study offers two main takeaways for policymakers working on issues of misinformation, accountability, and trust in institutions. First, the results indicate that the public can be persuaded by politicians who claim misinformation about scandals that are reported in text, but not as easily for those with an accompanying video. This suggests that media organizations and fact-checking efforts might be able to most successfully expose wrongful behaviour by politicians when they can offer video evidence. That being said, the experiments in this study were conducted in 2021 and 2022, before deepfakes became widely popularized. More research is needed to understand whether we may soon be entering an environment in which even the authenticity of unaltered videos is regularly called into question.
Second, the authors investigate whether it might be possible to fact-check politicians’ false claims of fake news. In a supplementary test, they randomly assigned some respondents to read a statement debunking a politician’s claim of misinformation. They find that this post hoc intervention effectively eliminates the “liar’s dividend” that a politician gains from alleging misinformation. This finding, consistent with other recent research on misinformation, suggests that fact-checking remains a viable strategy for promoting accountability in an era of increased information uncertainty.