PerspectiveFake News Is Fooling More Conservatives than Liberals. Why?

The “infodemic” around covid-19, declared by the WHO in February, is not the world’s first outbreak of misinformation, but one big difference between the infodemics of the past and those of 2020 is the rapid worldwide transmission of today’s nonsense, enabled by the internet. Social media enable people to share true news as well as the fake sort. But the fabulists seem to be winning.

The Economist writers that just as misinformation is not new, nor is its political use, but there is a difference here between the past and today as well. The historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal essay 1964 on the “paranoid style” in American politics, wrote that the paranoid style came as easily to those on the left as on the right, but, the Economist notes, “today’s infodemic appears to be spreading more easily among the world’s conservatives than its liberals.”

Conspiracy beliefs are associated with ideological extremism of any variety, argues Karen Douglas, an expert on conspiracy theories at the University of Kent. Yet she says there is an “asymmetry.” People on the right believe in them more often, and entertain a broader range of theories, particularly those that accuse the other “side” of plotting, whether that be left-wingers, foreigners or other groups.

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Structural shifts may explain why conservative voters seem to be more prone to the infodemic, and why conservative leaders have more reason—and are more likely—to undermine reliable sources. For one thing, conservatives’ complaints that elites are not on their side have become more plausible. In many countries the old left-right political divide, based on economics, has been replaced by a liberal-conservative split, based on culture. This largely pits liberal graduates against conservative school-leavers. And elites—whether in the media, the civil service, science or academia—are dominated by graduates.

The fact that the role of graduates in society has dramatically increased doesn’t necessarily make them partial, but people with less education, viewing the rapid cultural, societal, and economic changes around them, may well be suspicious.

There are other structural forces disposing conservatives to be more susceptible to fake news. The first is the increasing reliance of people on news-and-analysis echo-chambers, where TV channels and social media pages reinforcing a certain view of the world based on a certain selection – and deselection – of facts to be believed or rejected. Conservatives, because of the suspicion of and unease with the mainstream media, find these echo-chambers more appealing.

The second structure force is political polarization. In some countries, the electoral system gives conservative politicians a particular incentive to encourage polarization. As Ezra Klein argues in a new book on America, Why We’re Polarized, liberals tend to be concentrated in cities; conservatives are more spread out. In winner-takes-all systems, this puts liberal parties at a disadvantage, as they pile up huge majorities in cities while conservative parties win more seats by lower margins elsewhere. In the United States this means the Republicans can win the electoral college with a minority of the popular vote (as they did in 2000 and 2016). The upshot, argues Klein, “is that ultra-partisanship works better for conservatives. Liberals have to win votes from moderates; conservatives can prevail by just getting out their base. As politics becomes more polarized, energizing the base gets easier, and winning over moderates harder.”

The Economist concludes:

The lessons from history are gloomy. Hofstadter believed that political paranoia “may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population.” But, he warned, “certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.” Like the Iraq war and the global financial crisis, the pandemic may prove to be exactly that kind of catastrophe.