Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News

I think it is more a matter of recent political events shaping the discussion. They are shaping the discussion because the results were surprising to many people. That surprise has generated interest in understanding what happened™...I don't think political branding is a particularly recent phenomenon.

The other factor of the changing discussion is that there is more data and it is easier to collect. For example measuring cognitive ability (whatever that is) is easier with computers as is administering the experiment of rating people and processing the data for interesting statistics controlled for other variables (such as authoritarianism which apparently was also assessed for the subjects of the experiment).

To put it another way, people often seemed stuck to their long held opinions about the other candidate in light of additional information.