Drivers of Misinformation Belief and Sharing in Hong Kong, the UK, and the US

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Michael Chan, whose interest is in cross-national misinformation belief and sharing patterns. Mis- and disinformation is a global pattern, but are the motivations for engaging with such content the same across countries? If not, what does the mean for countermeasures against such problematic information?

Cognitive drivers may be intuitive thinking (a lack of analytical thinking or deliberation), cognitive failures (neglecting source cues or counter-evidence), or illusory truth (familiarity, fluency, and cohesion); socio-affective drivers may be source cues, emotion, and worldviews. This paper focusses on the cognitive drivers, and uses surveys to test for analytical thinking, news literacy, and conspiratorial thinking in the potential sharers of problematic information, across Hong Kong, the UK, and the US.

Greater news literacy turned out to increase belief in true and disbelief in false information across all three countries; this means that news literacy may be a useful tool against conspiratorial thinking. Greater conspiratorial thinking also increased the perceived accuracy of false news in the UK and US, but not in Hong Kong (where there is perhaps greater underlying news scepticism); greater analytical thinking decreases belief in false posts in the UK and Hong Kong, but not in the US. News literacy also decreases willingness to share both true and false information in the US and Hong Kong, but not the UK.

News literacy is the only consistent predictor here, therefore, and may serve as a useful measure in the fight against mis- and disinformation. Conspiratorial thinking is perhaps more relevant in countries where conspiracy theories are more salient – such as the UK and US. But specific attention should be paid here to the sharing of explicitly political posts, as well as the social-cognitive drivers of such sharing.