Who read “fake news” before 2016 US election

Science, bitches.

Overall, almost half of the people participating visited at least one article from a website on that list during the study period. But those articles accounted for only 6 percent of all news stories read. These numbers weren’t evenly distributed across the political spectrum, though. About 57 percent of Trump supporters in the group visited an untrustworthy site at least once, amounting to about 11 percent of total news consumption. For the Clinton supporters in the group, it was 28 percent of people visiting at least one article, for 1 percent of their total news consumption.

And drilling deeper into the data, a relatively small group of people is responsible for most of the visits to untrustworthy sites. The researchers categorized people by the ideological slant of their “news diet,” from those whose reading is dominated by liberal sites to those who only read conservative sites. The 20 percent of people farthest to the conservative end of the spectrum accounted for almost two-thirds of the untrustworthy articles read.