Specific and Consistent News Avoidance in Greece and Brazil

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

How different are these conceptualisation? What are their possible implications for democratic outcomes? In spite of the considerable differences between their political systems, both Greece and Brazil had two consecutive rounds of elections in 2023 and 2022, respectively, and the study asked participants in its representative surveys about their belief in misinformation, electoral participation, and trust in the electoral process as well as their selective avoidance of news about the elections and their consistent avoidance of news in general (9% in Greece, 36% in Brazil).

Consistent news avoidance emerged as a predictor of belief in electoral misinformation from this study; selective news avoidance did not produce similar results. Selective news avoidance affected electoral participation (and more strongly in Brazil, though non-voting is more difficult under Brazil’s compulsory voting system, and includes the submission of informal votes).

Both forms of news avoidance also predict lower level of electoral trust in Greece, while only consistent news avoidance had such effects in Brazil; oddly, an increase in selective news avoidance over time amongst participants in Brazil even increased their trust in the electoral system, and this may indicate that such late-coming selective news avoiders were happy with the electoral process and simply avoided the complaints from the election losers.

Overall, though, both behaviours have normatively negative democratic implications; they also differ notably in their effects, however, and may need to be further theorised as describing different phenomena.