The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

In his first White House press conference, Sean Spicer, then the Trump Administration press secretary, declared that Trump had had the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” But counts of Washington, D.C., Metro ridership and crowd estimates based on overhead photographs seemed to definitively show that Spicer’s claim was bogus.62 Several media outlets reported that the attendance was underwhelming compared with the previous two inaugurations of Barack Obama, let alone the massive Women’s March in Washington protesting the administration, which occurred the following day. Very quickly the White House’s denial of basic facts became the story.63 Political scientist Brian Schaffner and pollster Samantha Luks conducted a study of this incident.64 They showed almost fourteen hundred American adults photos of two inauguration crowds side by side. They then asked half of the survey participants which photo was from Trump’s inauguration and which from Obama’s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more Trump supporters than Hillary Clinton supporters falsely identified the more crowded photo as from the Trump inauguration. The other half of study participants were asked a different, presumably easier question: which photo had more people? The shocking result was that 15 percent of Trump supporters chose the photo with the clearly smaller crowd.