The next speaker in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session is Ana Sofia Cardenal, who has recently finished a project on pathways to misinformation that built on Web tracking data. The results of this work also inform a new project which constructs simulated environments for online discussions in order to explore how different discursive settings affect the dynamics of such discussions.
The earlier project addressed the substantial problem of mis- and disinformation, across digital and social media environments and beyond. It showed that visits to fringe and problematic information sources are actually fairly rare, even though many people hold at least some misinformed beliefs; this is likely explained by the role of partisan media, which sit between the mainstream and the fringes. Imbalanced media diets that focus only on a limited and homogeneous selection of partisan media are likely to lead to such misinformed beliefs.
The project explored these for Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK, using YouGov Web-tracking data from February to June 2022 (and therefore including the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine as well as the two rounds of the 2022 French parliamentary elections, as well as taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic and against the background of ongoing debates on immigration and climate change policies across these countries). Participants’ beliefs were tested through surveys, and media diets were assessed through a partisan selective exposure score that drew on a classification of partisan media outlets on a left-to-right scale.
Right-wing media diets were positively associated with holding misinformed beliefs; left-wing interests were associated with greater use of alternative media outlets. This is more pronounced for politically partisan issues (climate and immigration policies), and less so for COVID-19 and the Ukraine war – at least at the time of the research.
Partisan selective exposure is therefore a significant driver of misbeliefs; this is particularly strong in the United States, and for highly politicised issues. This also means that more carefully tailored strategies for counteracting such misbeliefs must be developed, depending on how politicised or unpoliticised specific issues are.
