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The Lawfare Podcast

Brendan Nyhan on the Empirical Effects of Disinformation

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

Politics, Terrorism, National Security, News, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Intelligence, Rule Of Law, Military, Constitutional Law, Current Events, International Relations, History, International Law, Government, Law

4.76.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Lawfare’s Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth University. We talk a lot about the crisis of falsehoods circulating online, but Nyhan’s work focuses on empirical research on what the effects of disinformation and misinformation actually are. And he’s found that those effects might play less of a role in political discourse than you’d think—or at least not quite in the way you might think. They talked about the fake news about fake news and the echo chamber about echo chambers.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:07.2

podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair.

0:14.7

That's patreon.com slash LawFair.

0:18.2

Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair

0:25.6

no bull and the aftermath.

0:32.6

You know, if you want to say where are people most likely to encounter false or misleading

0:38.3

claims about politics, it's still in the mainstream news.

0:40.4

And if you want to say what is the most important source of those false or misleading claims,

0:44.6

it's the president of the United States, right?

0:46.6

He is the most covered individual in the world.

0:49.3

He is heavily featured in the news sources that Americans get most of their news from.

0:54.9

So it's not surprising that exposure rates to falsehoods from Trump are going to be

0:59.4

vastly higher than a website set up by Macedonian teenagers.

1:05.0

And that means that when we're thinking about this problem, it's important not to focus

1:10.2

so much on the kinds of websites that pop after 2016.

1:14.3

There are problems.

1:15.3

They're part of this ecosystem and in some ways they're symptomatic of larger questions

1:19.2

that we need to think about.

1:20.8

But they're not the core source of misinformation for almost anybody.

1:25.8

And in some ways they're more important for what they tell us about the vulnerabilities

1:29.5

of our system to misinformation and the kinds of questions we're going to have to think

1:34.0

about how to address going forward.

...

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