Perceptions of Misinformation across Countries and Platforms

The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.

Do such perceptions of misinformation levels vary across countries, then, or across platforms? Does news interest or previous knowledge affect such perceptions? The present project surveyed people across 17 European countries and the US, and asked about perceptions for a range of social media platforms, messaging apps, conventional media, and alternative media. It also asked about prior interests in news about politics, the economy, entertainment, and science.

Further, it built a political and a misinformation knowledge index, by asking a range of general knowledge as well as ‘contested information’ questions (e.g. about climate change and COVID-19 vaccines). It turned out that people with higher political knowledge were generally less misinformed, except for a small subset of highly misinformed people who also had comparatively greater political knowledge.

People in the US as well as southern and Eastern European countries had higher perceptions of misinformation across all platforms, and all respondents saw Facebook and Twitter as particular sources of misinformation; alternative media were seen as broadly comparable with mainstream media in their levels of misinformation. There are also some significant country differences in perceptions of platforms. Overall, Europeans saw lower levels of misinformation than US respondents; Spain was substantively different here, though.

People with a strong interest in science also saw more misinformation everywhere, while for people with a strong interest in politics the results were mixed; people with an established leaning towards misinformation perceived levels of misinformation to be high everywhere except for alternative media (which is perhaps where they get their own misinformation from…).