You are fake news: political bias in perceptions of fake news

By S. van der Linden, Costas Panagopoulos, J. Roozenbeek. 2020

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the rise of fake news is posing an increasing threat to societies worldwide, little is known about what associations the term ‘fake news’ activates in the public mind. Here, we report a psychological bias that we describe as the ‘fake news effect’: the tendency for partisans to use the term ‘fake news’ to discount and discredit ideologically uncongenial media sources. In a national sample of the US population (N = 1000), we elicited top-of-mind associations with the term ‘fake news’. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find evidence that both liberals and conservatives freely associate traditionally left-wing (e.g. CNN) and right-wing (e.g. Fox News) media sources with the term fake news. Moreover, conservatives are especially likely to associate the mainstream media with the term fake news and these perceptions are generally linked to lower trust in media, voting for Trump, and higher belief in conspiracy theories.

Subfields: Communication, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d4a616b11237f259672714b2bf81d37cc591614

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Citations in the corpus

Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation (2020, background): “This finding that the intervention can be effective across partisan lines is particularly important in light of the polarization of not just the US media landscape, but of the term “fake news” itself (van der Linden et al., 2020).”
Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, unknown): “…and Roozenbeek 2020; Roozenbeek and van der Linden 2019), political science (Valenzuela et al. 2022; Bringula et al. 2022; Ricard and Medeiros 2020; Van der Linden et al. 2020; Allcott and Gentzkow 2017; Grinberg et al. 2019; Guess et al. 2019; Baptista and Gradim 2020), health science…”
Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing (2020, background): “…partisan identity predict the likelihood of sharing at least one story from a fake news source, but negative affect directed toward the out-group party, more so than positive affect toward the in-group party, appeared to drive sharing behaviors (see also Rathje, Van Bavel, & van der Linden, 2020).”