Measuring Belief in Misinformation Across Information Ecosystems

• In Event: Misinformed? Who, How, and Why

Abstract

Who believes misinformation? Most of what our knowledge about belief in misinformation comes from surveying Americans about misinformation from American media sources. These results have illustrated high levels of belief in misinformation as well as the important determinants of who believes fake news, but these results may have biased our understanding of belief in misinformation by focusing on one developed country where misinformation is predominantly produced by domestic actors. This differs from how misinformation is consumed in other countries, which are more likely to be targeted by disinformation campaigns run by foreign actors. Such disinformation campaigns have different goals and consequently target different sub-populations than misinformation campaigns in the United States. We test how belief in misinformation differs across countries and also which factors are important in understanding belief in misinformation in understudied countries. This leads us to our three research questions: (1) Is belief in misinformation different in countries that are more frequently targeted by disinformation campaigns? (2) In areas heavily targeted by disinformation, does an individual’s perception of these campaigns affect their belief in misinformation? (3) In areas in which most individuals are bilingual and news is reported in two languages, does the language in which one consumes a news article change how one perceives that news articles’ veracity?

To answer these questions, we ran two pre-registered field experiments in the United States and in Ukraine. In the United States, awareness of misinformation is low, misinformation is often produced by domestic actors, and misinformation is predominately consumed in the dominant language. This differs from Ukraine where the information ecosystem is more heavily saturated with misinformation, misinformation is mainly produced and spread by foreign actors, the majority of the population is bilingual in the same two languages, and misinformation predominately comes in one language.

Over four weeks we recruited a representative sample of 1,200 Americans and 3,000 Ukrainians to evaluate online articles popular in each respective country from non-credible and credible sources within 72 hours of their publication. To answer our third research question we randomly assigned the language of the article (Ukrainian or Russian) they were evaluating for the Ukrainian sample. In this study, we compared belief in misinformation between the US context and the Ukrainian context to identify how belief in misinformation differs across countries. Within the Ukrainian context, we also compared belief in misinformation between those with high and low perceived threat of Russian disinformation and by language of the article to better understand these factors common in other contexts. Our results provide an important contribution for those designing interventions to improve discernment of the veracity of news globally and also contribute to our broader understanding of the belief in misinformation.

Authors

• Richard Bonneau, NYU

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

• Kevin Aslett, New York University

• Aaron S. Erlich, McGill University