Political Misinformation Research Articles

PATHWAYS TO RADICALISM: EXAMINING ONLINE COMMUNITY AND POLITICAL PATHWAYS TO MORE RADICAL BELIEFS ON REDDIT

Recent research shows that “algorithmic radicalization” and “echo chambers”—the idea that recommendation algorithms on social media have a strong independent effect on radicalization and silo people into ideologically homogeneous communities—are not as prevalent nor influential as once feared. Yet, online political discourse is as toxic as ever while political misinformation continues to plague social media platforms. This begs the question: If algorithms aren’t encouraging radicalization, then what is producing it? Drawing from church-sect theory, this study interviews politically active Reddit users to better understand _how_ they arrived at their current media use, online engagement, and political beliefs. Results show that participants have a deep mistrust of mainstream media, leading them to seek alternative sources of political content. Reddit participation is also driven by a desire for “earnest” political discussions with like-minded individuals and cross-partisans, in part to “reject” partisan polarization. Despite engaging on more extreme subreddits, participants said their beliefs were unchanged, but that other Redditors had moved to more extreme beliefs over time. And, participants perceived their Reddit participation as necessary to _prevent_ radicalization and partisan polarization. Collectively, these results provide preliminary insight into the media and social/psychological pathways that could lead to online radicalization, providing an alternative explanation to algorithmic radicalization. This study also underscores the importance of interrogating the ecological pathways to radicalization for researchers and policy-makers; future interventions should account for attribution bias and the individual-level factors related to radicalization.

Visual misinformation on Facebook

Abstract We conduct the first large-scale study of image-based political misinformation on Facebook. We collect 13,723,654 posts from 14,532 pages and 11,454 public groups from August through October 2020, posts that together account for nearly all engagement of U.S. public political content on Facebook. We use perceptual hashing to identify duplicate images and computer vision to identify political figures. Twenty-three percent of sampled political images (N = 1,000) contained misinformation, as did 20% of sampled images (N = 1,000) containing political figures. We find enormous partisan asymmetry in misinformation posts, with right-leaning images 5–8 times more likely to be misleading, but little evidence that misleading images generate higher engagement. Previous scholarship, which mostly cataloged links to noncredible domains, has ignored image posts which account for a higher volume of misinformation. This research shows that new computer-assisted methods can scale to millions of images, and help address perennial and long-unanswered calls for more systematic study of visual political communication.

Uninformed and Misinformed: Advancing a Theoretical Model for Social Media News Use and Political Knowledge

Scholarship has now recognized the potentially detrimental effects of social media on political knowledge. At the same time, a separate but similar line of work has raised concerns that these platforms are the primary vector of political misinformation. Despite the renewed focus on misinformation studies, the question as to whether political knowledge and susceptibility to misinformation are related remains open. If they are indeed related, we still know little about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive political learning when people rely on social media for news. Based on a two-wave panel survey collected during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we found that social media news use fosters the news-finds-me perception (particularly among those who feel overwhelmed with the volume of information available on social media). This, in turn, leads people to be both uninformed and misinformed about politics and current affairs. Implications for democracy are discussed.

Would I lie to you? Party affiliation is more important than Brexit in processing political misinformation.

In recent years, the UK has become divided along two key dimensions: party affiliation and Brexit position. We explored how division along these two dimensions interacts with the correction of political misinformation. Participants saw accurate and inaccurate statements (either balanced or mostly inaccurate) from two politicians from opposing parties but the same Brexit position (Experiment 1), or the same party but opposing Brexit positions (Experiment 2). Replicating previous work, fact-checking statements led participants to update their beliefs, increasing belief after fact affirmations and decreasing belief for corrected misinformation, even for politically aligned material. After receiving fact-checks participants had reduced voting intentions and more negative feelings towards party-aligned politicians (likely due to low baseline support for opposing party politicians). For Brexit alignment, the opposite was found: participants reduced their voting intentions and feelings for opposing (but not aligned) politicians following the fact-checks. These changes occurred regardless of the proportion of inaccurate statements, potentially indicating participants expect politicians to be accurate more than half the time. Finally, although we found division based on both party and Brexit alignment, effects were much stronger for party alignment, highlighting that even though new divisions have emerged in UK politics, the old divides remain dominant.

Deepfakes and Political Misinformation in U.S. Elections

Audio and video footage produced with the help of AI can show politicians doing discreditable things that they have not actually done. This is deepfaked material. Deepfakes are sometimes claimed to have special powers to harm the people depicted and their audiences—powers that more traditional forms of faked imagery and sound footage lack. According to some philosophers, deepfakes are particularly “believable,” and widely available technology will soon make deepfakes proliferate. I first give reasons why deepfake technology is not particularly well suited to producing “believable” political misinformation in a sense to be defined. Next, I challenge claims from Don Fallis and Regina Rini about the consequences of the wide availability of deepfakes. My argument is not that deepfakes are harmless, but that their power to do major harm is highly conditional in liberal party political environments that contain sophisticated mass-media.

Fiduciary Duty as a Shield For Social Media User Privacy and Platform Policing of Political Misinformation and Disinformation

Fiduciary Duty as a Shield For Social Media User Privacy and Platform Policing of Political Misinformation and Disinformation

Misinformation in India's 2019 National Election

This study investigates the dynamics and dissemination of political misinformation in India's 2019 national election campaign, drawing on cases identified by internationally verified fact-checkers. Many political parties and their affiliates or supporters deployed both positive (pro-party) and negative (anti-party) misinformation claims. The distribution of measures of engagement with misinformation claims on Facebook (N=4,478) show BJP, INC and CPIM were most often deploying positive or pro-party misinformation, whereas more parties were targeted with negative or anti-party misinformation. The incumbent BJP was the target of the largest number of negative misinformation claims that came from challenger parties and the INC in particular, confirming extant research from Western contexts that challengers go negative and attack incumbents while the latter tend to focus more on accomplishments. Negative or anti-party misinformation was deployed more than twice as often as pro-party misinformation and diffused farther than positive or pro-party claims.

Fake or not? Automated detection of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation in social networks and digital media.

With the continuous spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation poses serious threats and concerns. COVID-19-related misinformation integrates a mixture of health aspects along with news and political misinformation. This mixture complicates the ability to judge whether a claim related to COVID-19 is information, misinformation, or disinformation. With no standard terminology in information and disinformation, integrating different datasets and using existing classification models can be impractical. To deal with these issues, we aggregated several COVID-19 misinformation datasets and compared differences between learning models from individual datasets versus one that was aggregated. We also evaluated the impact of using several word- and sentence-embedding models and transformers on the performance of classification models. We observed that whereas word-embedding models showed improvements in all evaluated classification models, the improvement level varied among the different classifiers. Although our work was focused on COVID-19 misinformation detection, a similar approach can be applied to myriad other topics, such as the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Examining the Democratic Potential of Data Journalism in Curing Misinformation

ABSTRACT The unprecedented rise of misinformation and its sociopolitical consequences are increasingly setting the research agenda for social science scholarship. Through examining the effectiveness of data journalism in debunking misinformation, the present study engages with the burgeoning discussions on how to develop countermeasures to mitigate the negative influences of misleading information dissemination. By selecting a widely held political misinformation case from the Chinese context—the “Military World Games and the origin of Covid-19”—and conducting online experiment (N = 317) the results of this study prove the perceived objectivity and credibility of data journalism, and its persuasive power to rebut misinformation, particularly for those with moderate-level prior misinformation beliefs. Building on these insights, this study contributes to an investigation of data journalism’s democratic potential to correct problematic information—an urgent task in the face of the “infodemic” threat worldwide.

Perceived Exposure and Concern for Misinformation in Different Political Contexts: Evidence From 27 European Countries

Political misinformation is becoming an increasingly central topic in both public and academic debate. The main normative concern is that the diffusion of false political news might lead to distorted perceptions of the social and political reality. Indeed, existing research largely focuses on the determinants of public misinformation and the spread of false news. However, the mere awareness of the diffusion of fake news might have important implications, by reducing the public trust in the information environment. This study aims at explaining the contextual variation in citizens’ perceived exposure to false information and their concerns for the impact of false information on society and democracy. We focus on two properties of the context: party polarization, as a proxy for the degree of political conflict, and media accuracy. We provide empirical evidence for our claims using a mix of data from Eurobarometer, the European Election Studies, the European Media System Survey, and Freedom House. We find that polarization and media accuracy are not related to the citizens’ self-assessed exposure to false information, but they are significantly associated with their concerns. We also find that citizens’ perceived exposure to false news is better explained by the degree of media freedom in the country.

Who Gets Exposed to Political Misinformation in a Hybrid Media Environment? The Case of the 2019 Indonesian Election

In the wake of the US 2016 Presidential Election, concerns about misinformation traversing on social media have heightened. Since then, much of the public discourse has been on developing effective strategies to combat the spread of misinformation online. While several studies have focused on the effects of a mixed/hybrid regime of information channels on political participation and campaigns, we know little about how the existence of a hybrid media system exposes people to misinformation during an election cycle. Using a nationally representative survey administered during the 2019 Indonesian election ( N = 1,820), we find evidence for the prominence of traditional media as well as face-to-face discussions: political use of traditional media such as newspapers and TV as well as sharing of political information through face-to-face discussions are found to be positively associated with at least one measure of misinformation exposure. As for the social media communicative pathways, only political use of WhatsApp and Instagram are found to be positively associated with misinformation exposure; that no similar effects are observed for Facebook and Twitter attests, to some extent, to the efficacy of strategies aimed at combating misinformation implemented on such platforms. By considering social media, traditional media, and face-to-face communication in a context of a less digitalized hybrid media environment, this article provides a more comprehensive framework and novel empirical data to study misinformation exposure beyond the context of Western democracies.

Personality and perspicacity: Role of personality traits and cognitive ability in political misinformation discernment and sharing behavior

This study examines whether personality traits predict an individual's perceived accuracy and sharing intention of political misinformation and if cognitive ability further moderates this relationship. An analysis of survey data from the US revealed that individuals with high agreeableness and low extraversion were more likely to discern pro-conservative misinformation correctly. Individuals with high agreeableness and conscientiousness were also less likely to share partisan misinformation. Further, individuals with high cognitive ability were more likely to discern correctly and less likely to share misinformation across the partisan spectrum. Moderation analyses suggest that low cognitive individuals with higher neuroticism and openness are more prone to sharing partisan misinformation. However, high levels of agreeableness can safeguard low cognitive individuals from sharing. We discuss the implications of this work for theorizing misinformation engagement and its effects.

Editorial: Political Misinformation in the Digital Age During a Pandemic: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Democratic Decision-Making

Editorial: Political Misinformation in the Digital Age During a Pandemic: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Democratic Decision-Making

Characterization of False or Misleading Fluoride Content on Instagram: Infodemiology Study.

BackgroundOnline false or misleading oral health–related content has been propagated on social media to deceive people against fluoride’s economic and health benefits to prevent dental caries.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to characterize the false or misleading fluoride-related content on Instagram.MethodsA total of 3863 posts ranked by users’ total interaction and published between August 2016 and August 2021 were retrieved by CrowdTangle, of which 641 were screened to obtain 500 final posts. Subsequently, two independent investigators analyzed posts qualitatively to define their authors’ interests, profile characteristics, content type, and sentiment. Latent Dirichlet allocation analysis topic modeling was then applied to find salient terms and topics related to false or misleading content, and their similarity was calculated through an intertopic distance map. Data were evaluated by descriptive analysis, the Mann-Whitney U test, the Cramer V test, and multiple logistic regression models.ResultsMost of the posts were categorized as misinformation and political misinformation. The overperforming score was positively associated with older messages (odds ratio [OR]=3.293, P<.001) and professional/political misinformation (OR=1.944, P=.05). In this context, time from publication, negative/neutral sentiment, author’s profile linked to business/dental office/news agency, and social and political interests were related to the increment of performance of messages. Although political misinformation with negative/neutral sentiments was typically published by regular users, misinformation was linked to positive commercial posts. Overall messages focused on improving oral health habits, side effects, dentifrice containing natural ingredients, and fluoride-free products propaganda.ConclusionsFalse or misleading fluoride-related content found on Instagram was predominantly produced by regular users motivated by social, psychological, and/or financial interests. However, higher engagement and spreading metrics were associated with political misinformation. Most of the posts were related to the toxicity of fluoridated water and products frequently motivated by financial interests.

Political Misinformation and Factual Corrections on the Facebook News Feed: Experimental Evidence

As concerns about the spread of political misinformation have mounted, scholars have found that fact-checks can reduce the extent to which people believe misinformation. Whether this finding extends to social media is unclear. Social media is a high-choice environment in which the cognitive effort required to separate truth from fiction, individuals’ penchant for select exposure, and motivated reasoning all may render fact-checks ineffective. Furthermore, large social media companies have largely refrained from permitting external researchers to administer experiments on their platforms. To investigate whether fact-checking can rebut misinformation on social media, we administer two experiments on large, nationally representative samples using a novel platform designed to mimic Facebook’s news feed. We observe corrections having large effects on factual beliefs (.62 on a five-point scale, p<.001). While misinformation degrades accuracy, our results offer strong evidence that fact-checks increase accuracy, even when tested on realistic simulations of social media platforms.

Social Media and Belief in Misinformation in Mexico: A Case of Maximal Panic, Minimal Effects?

Contrary to popular narratives, it is not clear whether using social media for news increases belief in political misinformation. Several of the most methodologically sound studies find small to nonexistent effects. However, extant research is limited by focusing on few platforms (usually Facebook, Twitter or YouTube) and is heavily U.S. centered. This leaves open the possibility that other platforms, such as those that rely on visual communication (e.g., Instagram) or are tailored to strong-tie network communication (e.g., WhatsApp), are more influential. Furthermore, the few studies conducted in other countries suggest that social media use increases political misperceptions. Still, these works use cross-sectional designs, which are ill suited to dealing with omitted variable bias and temporal ordering of processes. Using a two-wave survey fielded in Mexico during the 2021 midterm elections (N = 596), we estimate the relationship between frequency of news exposure on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp, and belief in political misinformation, while controlling for both time-invariant and time-dependent individual differences. In contrast to political discussion, information literacy and digital skills, none of the social platforms analyzed exhibits a significant association with misinformed beliefs. We also tested for possible indirect, moderated, and reciprocal relationships, but none of these analyses yielded a statistically significant result. We conclude that the study is consistent with the “minimal media effects” paradigm, which suggests that efforts to address misinformation need to go beyond social platforms.

Fallibility Salience Increases Intellectual Humility: Implications for People's Willingness to Investigate Political Misinformation.

The spread of online political misinformation has ramifications for political polarization, trust in political systems, and the functioning of democracy. In this article, we advance findings on investigative behaviors-actions aimed at determining the veracity of information encountered online-in response to political misinformation. Across three preregistered studies (N = 889), we find that investigative behaviors increase accuracy discernment of political misinformation (Study 1), that intellectual humility reliably predicts investigative behaviors in this context (Study 2), and test a novel fallibility salience manipulation to increase intellectual humility (Study 3). We discuss the implications of these findings for reducing the impacts of political misinformation.

Fake News and Misinformation During the Pandemic: What We Know and What We Do Not Know

During the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading fake news and misinformation in society can cause more problems than usual. It may lead people to make wrong decisions, causing further spreading of the disease to others. This may result in outbreaks and shut down of the economy. However, experts have already pointed out that political misinformation and health misinformation are entangled as some people would challenge those canon ideas on health information fueled by political agendas. Therefore, we review recent research on misinformation and fake news related to health and political areas to help understand this misinformation “infodemic.”

Relationship between Misinformation Spreading Behaviour and True/false Judgments and Literacy: An Empirical Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccine and Political Misinformation in Japan

Relationship between Misinformation Spreading Behaviour and True/false Judgments and Literacy: An Empirical Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccine and Political Misinformation in Japan

Poll Watching

If all options were possible, what policy changes would make voting, and democracy, work better? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the narrator lives in a world where all public political affiliations are illegal leading up to, and shortly after, their every-ten-year elections. No colors, no symbols, and no public speech so as to limit political misinformation and post-election turmoil. Additionally, everyone is required to vote, unless they are granted a government exemption. This is meant to create a more stable democracy. The narrator’s party ends up winning the election. At the end of the story, the evil side of this “improved” democracy shows itself; those that lose the election are summarily rounded up and killed by the government.