A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India

By A. Guess, M. Lerner, Benjamin A. Lyons, J. Montgomery, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, N. Sircar. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020

622 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Few people are prepared to effectively navigate the online information environment. This global deficit in digital media literacy has been identified as a critical factor explaining widespread belief in online misinformation, leading to changes in education policy and the design of technology platforms. However, little rigorous evidence exists documenting the relationship between digital media literacy and people’s ability to distinguish between low- and high-quality news online. This large-scale study evaluates the effectiveness of a real-world digital media literacy intervention in both the United States and India. Our largely encouraging results indicate that relatively short, scalable interventions could be effective in fighting misinformation around the world. Widespread belief in misinformation circulating online is a critical challenge for modern societies. While research to date has focused on psychological and political antecedents to this phenomenon, few studies have explored the role of digital media literacy shortfalls. Using data from preregistered survey experiments conducted around recent elections in the United States and India, we assess the effectiveness of an intervention modeled closely on the world’s largest media literacy campaign, which provided “tips” on how to spot false news to people in 14 countries. Our results indicate that exposure to this intervention reduced the perceived accuracy of both mainstream and false news headlines, but effects on the latter were significantly larger. As a result, the intervention improved discernment between mainstream and false news headlines among both a nationally representative sample in the United States (by 26.5%) and a highly educated online sample in India (by 17.5%). This increase in discernment remained measurable several weeks later in the United States (but not in India). However, we find no effects among a representative sample of respondents in a largely rural area of northern India, where rates of social media use are far lower.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/415450e2590f080c9262c9da5bf1043a86725ae1

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Citations in the corpus

The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “For example, presenting a simple list of 12 digital media literacy tips improved people's capacity to discern between true and false news in the USA and India [104].”
All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation (2020, background): “Republicans found the Fox News story more credible (mean of 3.35 on 1 – 4 Likert scale, 95% CI = 3.17 – 3.53) than the Huffington Post (mean 2.98, 95% CI = 2.78 – 3.17), and Democrats found the ) (Iyengar and Hahn 2009), we show that even without brand associations, partisans favor such outlets.”
The Effects of Unsubstantiated Claims of Voter Fraud on Confidence in Elections (2021, background): “…Monson and Patterson 2009), the immediate object of criticism, and potentially undermines 2This survey also included orthogonal studies reported in Guess et al. (2020). terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2021.18 Downloaded from…”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “However, while the evidence on the effectiveness of correction of misperceptions in the political domain is mixed, such “backfiring” effects seem to be the exception (Guess et al., 2020; Nyhan, 2020, 2021).”
Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation (2021, background): “With regards to real news, unlike Study 1, we find ambiguous results in Study 2: playing Go Viral! increases the perceived manipulativeness of real news immediately after the intervention (similar to findings by Guess et al., 2020), whereas this effect is not observed for the infographics.”