It’s not just making people believe false things—a new study suggests it’s also making them less likely to consume or accept information.

[DaLveN @CSBD]

The rise of fake news in the American po[CENSORED]r consciousness is one of the remarkable growth stories in recent years—a dizzying climb to make any Silicon Valley unicorn jealous. Just a few years ago, the phrase was meaningless. Today, according to a new Pew Research Center study, Americans rate it as a larger problem than racism, climate change, or terrorism. Put politics in perspective. Subscribe to Politics & Policy Daily for the biggest stories and most intriguing ideas across the political landscape.

But remarkable though that may seem, it’s not actually what’s most interesting about the study. Pew finds that Americans have deeply divergent views about fake news and different responses to it, which suggest that the emphasis on misinformation might actually run the risk of making people, especially conservatives, less well informed. More than making people believe false things, the rise of fake news is making it harder for people to see the truth. Pew doesn’t define what it calls “made-up news,” which is a reasonable choice in the context of a poll, but matters a great deal in interpreting it. The term has come to mean different things to different people. It was coined to describe deliberately false articles created by Potemkin news sites and spread on social media. But in a deliberate effort to muddy the waters, President Donald Trump began labeling news coverage that was unfavorable to him “fake news.” (Indeed, Pew finds that Americans blame politicians and their aides, more than the press, activist groups, or foreign actors, for the problem of made-up news.) Now when Trump’s supporters refer to “fake news,” they often seem to mean mainstream news they dislike, whereas when others do so, they mean bogus information spread by fringe actors.

Read: Why bogus news stories are so hard to stop If Pew’s data are taken to mean that people find this latter category more dangerous than climate change, that is almost certainly an overreaction. As the political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote in February, summarizing the state of research in the field: Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election. Pew finds a significant gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on the seriousness of the problem with made-up news, though: