Who Uses Fact-Checking Sites? The Impact of Demographics, Political Antecedents, and Media Use on Fact-Checking Site Awareness, Attitudes, and Behavior

Robertson, Craig T.; Mourão, Rachel R.; Thorson, Esther

doi:10.1177/1940161219898055

Cited by 67 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The PCA yielded four components with eigenvalues greater than 1.0: mainstream media, such as center-leftleaning newspapers and magazines, center-right leaning newspapers and magazines, liberal websites, and NPR/PBS; TV sources, such as ABC, NBC, and CNN; medical information sources, such as WebMD, doctors, and the CDC website; and conservative news sources, such as Fox News and conservative talk radio. These repertoires of source use align with prior research in the United States (e.g., Mourão et al, 2018;Robertson et al, 2020).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…The benefit of this approach is that it allows for a degree of specificity when asking survey respondents about media use while not overwhelming them with a large number of response options. It is also theoretically and empirically driven, rooted in prior works that have identified sets of ideologically and interest-based news repertoires in the United States across media sources and platforms (Mourão et al, 2018;Robertson et al, 2020).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Information Seeking Patterns and COVID-19 in the United States

Reisdorf

Blank²,

Bauer³

et al. 2021

JQD

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In this paper, we describe how socioeconomic background and political leaning are related to how U.S. residents look for information on COVID-19. Using representative survey data from 2,280 U.S. internet users, collected in fall 2020, we examine how factors, such as age, gender, race, income, education, political leaning, and internet skills are related to how many different types of sources and what types of sources respondents use to find information on COVID-19. Moreover, we describe how many checking actions individuals use to verify information, and how all of these factors are related to knowledge about COVID-19. Results show that men, those with higher education, higher incomes, and higher self-perceived internet ability, and those who are younger used more types of information sources. Similar patterns emerged for checking actions. When we examined different types of sources (mainstream media, conservative sources, medical sources, and TV sources), three patterns emerged: 1) respondents who have more resources used more types of sources; 2) demographic factors made less difference for conservative media consumers; and 3) conservative media were the only type of source used less by younger age groups than older age groups. Finally, availability of resources and types of information sources were related to differences in factual knowledge. Respondents who had fewer resources, those who used conservative news media, and those who engaged in more checking actions got fewer answers right. This difference could lead to information divides and associated knowledge gaps in the United States regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Seeking Patterns and COVID-19 in the United States

Reisdorf

Blank²,

Bauer³

et al. 2021

JQD

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Taken together, these findings suggest that fact-checking is failing to reach precisely those politically uninterested and disaffected citizens that are arguably most vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation. Moreover, there are clear signs that political cleavages similar to those identified by previous research in the United States (Robertson et al 2020) shape attitudes toward fact-checking in Europe as well. In most countries, satisfaction with the European Union is positively associated with favorability toward fact-checking.…”

Section: Clarifying Challenges Assessing Solutions: This Special Issuesupporting

confidence: 56%

Digital Threats to Democracy: Comparative Lessons and Possible Remedies

Miller

Vaccari

2020

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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We introduce a special issue that collects eight articles, comprising research from twenty-three countries and four continents on the sources, impact on citizens, and possible remedies to various digital threats to democracy, ranging from disinformation to hate speech to state interference with online freedoms. We set these contributions against the backdrop of a profound change in how scholars think about the implications of digital media for democracy. From the utopianism that prevailed from the 1990s until the early 2010s, the post-2016 reckoning has led to a change in the kinds of questions scholars ask, with the focus gradually shifting to investigations of the threats, rather than the benefits, of the Internet. The eight contributions presented in this special issue employ a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods, often comparing different countries, to address some of the most pressing questions on how the Internet can hinder the feasibility and well-functioning of democracy around the world. We conclude by setting out three challenges for future research on digital media and politics: a growing but still partial understanding of the extent and impact of the main digital threats to democracy; the risk that the dominant approaches become overly pessimistic, or founded on weak normative grounds; and the risk that research overemphasizes direct and short-term implications of digital threats on individuals and specific groups at the expense of indirect and medium-term effects on collective norms and expectations of behavior.

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“…Motivations to share fact-checks are also unclear. Previous work from political contexts in the United States showed that motivations to share fact-checks could be linked to age, ideology, and political behaviours ( Amazeen et al, 2019 ), with more politically liberal users as the primary consumer of fact-checking materials ( Robertson et al, 2020 ). During COVID-19, concern for health and safety was correlated with a higher acceptance of fact-checking in the United States, with greater effect sizes for republicans ( Rich et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demographics and topics impact on the co-spread of COVID-19 misinformation and fact-checks on Twitter

Burel

Farrell

Alani

2021

Information Processing & Management

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Correcting misconceptions and false beliefs are important for injecting reliable information about COVID-19 into public discourse, but what impact does this have on the continued proliferation of misinforming claims? Fact-checking organisations produce content with the aim of reducing misinformation spread, but our knowledge of its impact on misinformation for particular topics and demographics is limited. In this article, we explore the relation between misinformation and fact-checking spread during the COVID-19 pandemic for different topics, user demographics and attributes. We specifically follow misinformation and fact-checks emerging from December 2019 until the 4th of January 2021 on Twitter. Using a combination of spread variance analysis, impulse response modelling and causal analysis, we highlight the bidirectional, weak causation spread behaviour between misinformation and fact-checks. Although we observe that fact-checks about COVID-19 are appearing fairly quickly after misinformation is circulated, its ability to reduce overall misinformation spread appears to be limited. This is especially visible for misinformation about conspiracy theories and the causes of the virus.

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Who Uses Fact-Checking Sites? The Impact of Demographics, Political Antecedents, and Media Use on Fact-Checking Site Awareness, Attitudes, and Behavior

Cited by 67 publications

References 24 publications

Information Seeking Patterns and COVID-19 in the United States

Information Seeking Patterns and COVID-19 in the United States

Digital Threats to Democracy: Comparative Lessons and Possible Remedies

Demographics and topics impact on the co-spread of COVID-19 misinformation and fact-checks on Twitter

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