Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change

Linden, Sander van der; Leiserowitz, Anthony; Rosenthal, Seth A.; Maibach, Edward

doi:10.1002/gch2.201600008

Cited by 677 publications

(510 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(116 reference statements)

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“…However, positive consensus messaging is not sufficient, given recent findings that misinformation can undermine positive information about climate change [33,56]. As a complement to positive messages, inoculation interventions are an effective way to neutralize the influence of misinformation.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence

2017

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Misinformation can undermine a well-functioning democracy. For example, public misconceptions about climate change can lead to lowered acceptance of the reality of climate change and lowered support for mitigation policies. This study experimentally explored the impact of misinformation about climate change and tested several pre-emptive interventions designed to reduce the influence of misinformation. We found that false-balance media coverage (giving contrarian views equal voice with climate scientists) lowered perceived consensus overall, although the effect was greater among free-market supporters. Likewise, misinformation that confuses people about the level of scientific agreement regarding anthropogenic global warming (AGW) had a polarizing effect, with free-market supporters reducing their acceptance of AGW and those with low free-market support increasing their acceptance of AGW. However, we found that inoculating messages that (1) explain the flawed argumentation technique used in the misinformation or that (2) highlight the scientific consensus on climate change were effective in neutralizing those adverse effects of misinformation. We recommend that climate communication messages should take into account ways in which scientific content can be distorted, and include pre-emptive inoculation messages.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence

2017

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“…It is also unclear how these SERPs might have affected users' decision-making [21,22]. Future research could incorporate various types of user studies with our data collection method to potentially answer these questions [1,21,59,60,72], and should investigate possibilities for suppressing unwanted influences with design interventions [22,42,54].…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditing the Personalization and Composition of Politically-Related Search Engine Results Pages

Robertson

Lazer

Wilson

2018

Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '18

113

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Search engines are a primary means through which people obtain information in today's connected world. Yet, apart from the search engine companies themselves, little is known about how their algorithms filter, rank, and present the web to users. This question is especially pertinent with respect to political queries, given growing concerns about filter bubbles, and the recent finding that bias or favoritism in search rankings can influence voting behavior. In this study, we conduct a targeted algorithm audit of Google Search using a dynamic set of political queries. We designed a Chrome extension to survey participants and collect the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and autocomplete suggestions that they would have been exposed to while searching our set of political queries during the month after Donald Trump's Presidential inauguration. Using this data, we found significant differences in the composition and personalization of politically-related SERPs by query type, subjects' characteristics, and date. CCS CONCEPTS INTRODUCTIONRecent concerns surrounding political polarization, fake news, and the impact of media on public opinion have largely focused on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Yet, recent surveys suggest that more news is sought through search engines than social media [2,57], and that search engines are the secondmost likely news gateway to inspire follow-up actions, such as This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution.

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“…They should draw on a growing body of research, some in related fields such as climate change,16 on confronting disinformation. It is important not to overcomplicate messages or repeat erroneous ones, even to correct them14; “inoculating” the public with the facts before disinformation takes hold may be effective 17…”

Section: Fighting Backmentioning

confidence: 99%