Risk Perceptions of Misinformation Exposure Across Platforms, Issues, Modalities, and Countries: A Comparative Study Across the Global North and South

Abstract

Mis- and disinformation have been associated with detrimental political consequences, such as increasing ideological and epistemic polarization. Yet, we know little about how people perceive the risks of misinformation across countries and domains of information. As holding high-risk perceptions of encountering misinformation across domains may result in high levels of media cynicism and uncertainty, it is important to explore news users’ relative risk perceptions related to mis- and disinformation. Therefore, this article relies on original survey data collected in seven countries: Argentina ( N = 507), Brazil ( N = 650), Chile ( N = 485), Mexico ( N = 461), the United States ( N = 521), Spain ( N = 576), and the Netherlands ( N = 518) (total N = 3,718). Main findings indicate that news users arrive at high estimates of mis- and disinformation’s proportion across all countries. Although higher-risk information domains (i.e., political advertising) are generally more likely to be associated with misinformation than lower-risk domains (i.e., scientific evidence), our findings foreground important country-level differences that relate to varying levels of resilience across the seven democracies studied. Our findings offer important evidence for the relative assessments of risk related to misinformation across contexts that vary on vulnerability to the threats of misinformation.