Study: Debunking Trump makes his voter base believe his lies even more

A new study published in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review found that fact-checks of lies from Donald Trump are more likely to make his diehard supporters believe in his falsehoods.

Researchers showed people Twitter (now X) posts from Trump that feature lies about election fraud, along with a note that said his claims were “disputed.”

“Trump voters with high political knowledge judged election misinformation as more truthful when Trump’s claims included Twitter’s disputed tags compared to a control condition,” the report revealed.

The study, conducted by University of Minnesota Duluth professor John Blanchar and Swarthmore College professor Catherine Norris, surveyed 1,078 Americans in late 2020.

Blanchar told The Guardian, “Instead of having no impact, the tags seemed counterproductive, reinforcing misinformation among this group.”

Lies and misinformation are central to Trump’s 2024 campaign. He has painted what the Washington Post described as an “imaginary and frightening world,” touching on several conservative obsessions.

Some of Trump’s go-to falsehoods:

• Democrats support “executing” babies after birth.

• Crime is so high that people “can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped.”

• Haitian migrants are “eating the dogs … eating the cats.”

In a story on Trump’s fake allegations, a 59-year-old Trump supporter told the Post, “I don’t think he does stretch the truth,” and said the stories about eating pets was “an absolute truth.”

Many of Trump’s fantastical claims can be traced back to right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Right-wing media has promoted election lies, falsehoods about LGBTQ+ people, and health care misinformation, among many other topics, while also running interference for Trump and the Republican Party on issues like immigration, guns, and abortion.

Much of the audience for this distorted coverage also constitutes the core of Trump’s political support.

The study showed different results for people who didn’t support Trump in 2020.

“Although [Joe] Biden voters were largely unaffected by these soft moderation tags, third-party and non-voters were slightly less likely to judge election misinformation as true,” the report’s authors wrote.

The disparity in perceptions echo findings from a September poll from Civiqs for DailyKos. A majority of registered voters (54%) said they thought Trump was “weird,” as did 51% of those assessing his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Most voters did not think Vice President Kamala Harris or her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, were “weird.”

While majorities of Democrats and independents found the Republican ticket to be “weird,” Republican respondents were the outliers, with 87% percent saying Trump was not weird and 83% saying the same of Vance.

Despite Trump’s behavior during the campaign and since he became a public figure, his voters continue to stand by their man.