Survey : Debunking Obama Rumors May Have Helped

It was June 20, 2008, and the first recorded Ohio blogger shot was fired back against the right-wing fringe effort to smear Barack Obama. Plunderbund blogger Eric Vessels, after receiving an Obama smear that the Democratic candidate refused to wear a lapel pin, decided to post the sender's email address on his blog. Tim at BloggerInterrupted took it a step further and posted the sender, the originator, and the recipient email addresses. He then emailed every one of them the facts about Obama and the pin.

The responses of Eric and Tim to a viral smear campaign may have been extreme examples of people seeking to debunk these rumors and myths, but a recent study shows that their efforts, and the efforts of others not willing to stay quiet, helped.

The study, conducted by R. Kelly Garrett, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, and James N. Danzinger, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, does not specifically cite blogger response as a the driving force in debunking the rumors, but it would certainly seem that those efforts (coordinated or not) impacted the results of their findings.

"...a representative national telephone survey of 600 Americans to learn about the role of the Internet in spreading rumors about the presidential campaign.  The survey was conducted the two weeks following the election (November 6 to 20) and has a margin of error of 4.4 percent....

"...The most-believed rumor was the claim that Obama is a Muslim, accepted by 22 percent of the total people surveyed.  The other seven rumors were believed by 3 percent to 20 percent of respondents.

"One piece of good news is that many of the people who heard rumors about the candidates also encountered evidence contradicting the false claims.  For example, the majority of people who heard the rumor that Obama is Muslim also heard the rumor challenged.  Overall, the most widely known rumors were also most widely disputed..."

To be fair, the results of the survey showed that the heaviest online users were likely to hear challenges to the smears and were least likely to believe them in the first place.

“When people looked for accurate information on the Internet, and they often did, they could find it.  Ultimately, the Internet did not have much influence on what people believed,” he said.

“Our results suggest that the Internet does not pose the kind of threat to public knowledge that some have imagined.”

Garrett said he and Danziger will use the data from the survey to perform a more detailed analysis of the role of the Internet in spreading rumors during the 2008 election."

The issue for me has never been the heavy internet user, but rather, the person who basically uses the internet for email once a day at home and some limited surfing. If those people were receiving the TRUTH as well as the rumors, it seems logical to conclude that they might be less inclined to believe the smears. It'll be interesting to see if this is addressed when they perform their detailed analysis.