Abstract
It has been widely argued that social media users with low digital literacy—who lack fluency with basic technological concepts related to the internet—are more likely to fall for online misinformation, but surprisingly little research has examined this association empirically. In a large survey experiment involving true and false news posts about politics and COVID-19, we found that digital literacy is indeed an important predictor of the ability to tell truth from falsehood when judging headline accuracy. However, digital literacy is not a robust predictor of users’ intentions to share true versus false headlines. This observation resonates with recent observations of a substantial disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions. Furthermore, our results suggest that lack of digital literacy may be useful for helping to identify people with inaccurate beliefs, but not for identifying those who are more likely to spread misinformation online.
Highlights
● How does the strength of these associations with digital literacy compare to other constructs that have been previously associated with truth discernment, analytic thinking and general procedural news knowledge?
Of sharing each headline in social media, as well as completing two measures of digital literacy along with analytic thinking, procedural news knowledge, partisanship, and basic demographics. ● Both digital literacy measures were positively associated with the ability to tell true from false headlines when assessing accuracy, regardless of the user’s partisanship or whether the headlines were about politics or COVID-19
General news knowledge was a stronger predictor of accuracy discernment than digital literacy, and analytic thinking was similar in strength to digital literacy. ● neither digital literacy measure was consistently associated with sharing discernment. ● These results emphasize the previously documented disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions and suggest that while digital literacy is a useful predictor of people’s ability to tell truth from falsehood, this may not translate to predicting the quality of information people share online
Summary
● How does the strength of these associations with digital literacy compare to other constructs that have been previously associated with truth discernment, analytic thinking and general procedural news knowledge?. McGrew et al (2019), Breakstone et al (2021), and Brodsky et al (2021) found that much more extensive fact-checking training modules focused on lateral reading improved students’ assessments of source and information credibility. These interventions were focused more on media literacy than on digital skills per se; and Hameleers (2020) found that a media literacy intervention with no digital literacy component increased American and Dutch subjects’ ability to identify misinformation. Badrinathan (2021) found no effect of an hour-long media literacy training of Indian subjects’ ability to tell truth from falsehood
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