Journal article
The Electoral Misinformation Nexus: how news consumption, platform use, and trust in news influence belief in electoral misinformation
- Abstract:
- Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and electoral institutions—sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors—is a challenge to public confidence in elections specifically and democracy more broadly. In this article, we analyze a combination of 42 million clicks in links and apps from behavioral tracking data of 2,200 internet users and a four-wave panel survey to investigate how different kinds of online news and media use relates to beliefs in electoral misinformation during a contentious political period—the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. We find that, controlling for other factors, using news from legacy news media is associated with belief in fewer claims of electoral misinformation over time. We find null or inconsistent effects for using digital-born news media and various digital platforms including Facebook and WhatsApp. Furthermore, we find that trust in news plays a significant role as a moderator. Belief in electoral misinformation, in turn, undermines trust in news. Overall, our findings document the important role of the news media as an institution in curbing electoral misinformation, even as they also underline the precarity of trust in news during contentious political periods.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.1MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1093/poq/nfae019
Authors
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Journal:
- Public Opinion Quarterly More from this journal
- Volume:
- 88
- Issue:
- SI
- Pages:
- 681–707
- Publication date:
- 2024-07-22
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-10-09
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1537-5331
- ISSN:
-
0033-362X
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
1560529
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1560529
- Deposit date:
-
2023-11-09
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Mont’Alverne et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of American Association for Public Opinion Research. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits noncommercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial reuse, please contact [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfae019
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record