It might seem that video would be a singularly influential medium for spreading information online. But a new experiment conducted by MIT researchers finds that video clips have only a modestly larger impact on political persuasion than the written word does. “Our conclusion is that watching video is not much more persuasive than reading text,” says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. The study comes amid widespread concern about online political misinformation, including the possibility that technology-enabled “deepfake” videos could easily…
