Welcome to the politics, guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

Thank you. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University. Today in the show, we'll be talking about a recently released research paper on fake news that's getting a lot of media attention.

It's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the New Yorker, and a bunch of other places.

The paper's title is Selective Exposure to Misinformation, Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News

during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

And I'll be talking about it with one of the authors, Jason Reifler, a professor of political

science at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Reifler, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So, first off, can you tell me how this research project came about in the first place?

So, like, with a lot of interesting research projects, it came about, to some degree, out of luck. So Andy Guess, Brendan Nihann and I had a

study in the field. We were doing a survey and the cool thing about the survey that we were doing

in addition to the content that we were asking is we were able to see the websites that people were

visiting. So there was a separate data component that people opted into to see, to have their

web traffic recorded. So we can see what websites they're going to. And we had originally done this

for something else.

And then as the election was going on, and once it ended, we realized that we would be

in a pretty unique position to estimate how much fake news people were visiting, what types

of fake news they were visiting. Is this something that existed on both sides at the political spectrum?

And so we're able to connect the survey responses to the web data.

And it just allowed us to do something that was really cool, that was not what we originally planned. Sometimes

it's better to be lucky. Sometimes luck is on your side.

...