A new study suggests fake news might have won Donald Trump the 2016 election

Researchers at Ohio State University find that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories. For those defecting from Clinton, believing fake news actually had a greater effect than anything except being a Republican or personally disliking Clinton. Obama voters who believed one of these fake news stories “were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who believed none of these false claims, after taking into account all of these other factors,” write OSU researchers Richard Gunther, Paul Beck and Erik Nisbet. “We cannot prove that belief in fake news caused these former Obama voters to defect from the Democratic candidate in 2016,” they write. “These data strongly suggest, however, that exposure to fake news did have a significant impact on voting decisions.”