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Countering Misinformation in the Global South

Thu, August 31, 4:00 to 5:30pm PDT (4:00 to 5:30pm PDT), LACC, Petree Hall C

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The prevalence of so-called fake news - false or misleading content purposefully produced to resemble news stories - and its potential to shape citizens’ attitudes and behavior have garnered widespread concern. Among other issues, the intricate role of social media and the internet in facilitating the spread of misinformation and magnifying its global consequences in a rapidly evolving digital information society has become a prominent concern among policymakers, academic experts, and media.

Despite such broad interest in the relationship between social media and disinformation, a large part of the scholarly and expert scholarship on this issue comes from advanced democracies. Such a restrictive focus has several consequences – we know far less about different social media applications that are considerably more prevalent in other parts of the world, the generalizability of scholarly evidence and the validity of policy recommendations to fight misinformation from a global perspective is somewhat shorthanded.

In this panel, we bring together four different manuscripts from twelve scholars with expertise in political behavior and political communication to present novel research focusing on the issue of online misinformation in the context of the Global South. The panel contributes to literature in several directions. First, by focusing on new social media applications, like WhatsApp, which are not regularly investigated by the literature due to its higher prevalence in the Global South. Second, by bringing evidence of the effectiveness of measures to counter the spread of misinformation in different contexts, bringing evidence from five different countries (Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Indian and Pakistan). Finally, by proposing novel theoretical frameworks to understand the effects of misinformation and its intricate relationship with the digital world, for example, discussing the importance of identity-based motivations for misinformation beliefs in more polarized societies from the Global South.

The panel’s first paper by Morgan Wack combines behavioral data from Twitter and survey experiments to understand the prevalence and how to remedy beliefs for election misinformation in Kenya’s 2022 Presidential Election. Wack’s work relies on a coded subset of Twitter data collected throughout Kenya’s 2022 presidential election campaign to assess the prevalence and composition of misinformation related to electoral. As a follow-up, Wack shows results of lab experiments examining the effectiveness of prompt users to question various aspects of popular misinformation in Kenya, including its veracity, source, and social congruence.

The second paper, co-authored by Sumitra Badrinathan, Simon Chauchard, Niloufer Siddiqui, brings our panel to the issue of misinformation and its effects on vigilante violence. The paper looks at a joint experiment in India and Pakistan to measure the causal effect of misinformation on anti-minority vigilante violence, using a novel audio medium treatment. The authors find that countering misinformation significantly reduces support for vigilantism, even amongst the most polarized subgroups of our sample.

The third paper by Jessica Gottlieb, Claire Adida, Richard Moussa offers a novel theoretical framework that highlights limitations of digital literacy intervention to increase individual capacity to identify misinformation online. The authors argue that these interventions ignore identity-based motivations to consume biased media, and therefore, have limited effects on context of highly salient identities. To test their novel framework, the authors propose three interventions that leverage insights on how social identity shapes behavior, and test each with an information experiment in Côte d’Ivoire, a polarized country. Results indicate that a standard digital literacy intervention fails to curb the belief in and spread of misinformation, while our social-identity based interventions limited both.

The fourth paper by Tiago Ventura, Rajeshwari Majumdar, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua A. Tucker brings to our panel results from a novel field experiment measuring the causal effects of WhatsApp on exposure and beliefs to misinformation in the context of the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. The authors conducted a field experiment that randomly assigns users to a Media-Constrained WhatsApp, in which participants were incentivized not to access any media, image, or video received during the weeks before the presidential election. Their results indicate that removing access to multimedia content on WhatsApp significantly reduces users’ exposure to popular misinformation rumors. However, beyond a reduction in exposure, the paper uncovers null effects for changes in beliefs in misinformation rumors, as well as a reduction in aggregate polarization index or subjective well-being. This study contributes to the growing literature on the causal effects of reducing social media usage on political attitudes and behavior.

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