The Electoral Misinformation Nexus: How News Consumption, Platform Use, and Trust in News Influence Belief in Electoral Misinformation.

IF 2.9 1区社会学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Public Opinion Quarterly Pub Date : 2024-07-22 eCollection Date: 2024-01-01 DOI:10.1093/poq/nfae019

Camila Mont'Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Sayan Banerjee, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and electoral institutions-sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors-is a challenge to public confidence in elections specifically and democracy more broadly. In this article, we analyze a combination of 42 million clicks in links and apps from behavioral tracking data of 2,200 internet users and a four-wave panel survey to investigate how different kinds of online news and media use relate to beliefs in electoral misinformation during a contentious political period-the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. We find that, controlling for other factors, using news from legacy news media is associated with belief in fewer claims of electoral misinformation over time. We find null or inconsistent effects for using digital-born news media and various digital platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp. Furthermore, we find that trust in news plays a significant role as a moderator. Belief in electoral misinformation, in turn, undermines trust in news. Overall, our findings document the important role of the news media as an institution in curbing electoral misinformation, even as they also underline the precarity of trust in news during contentious political periods.

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选举误导信息的联系：新闻消费、平台使用和对新闻的信任如何影响对选举误导信息的相信。

选举误导信息，即公民相信有关选举过程和选举机构的虚假或误导性说法--有时是由政治行为者积极和策略性地传播--是对公众对选举乃至民主的信心的挑战。在这篇文章中，我们分析了 2200 名互联网用户行为跟踪数据中的 4200 万次链接和应用程序点击，并结合四波面板调查，研究了在 2022 年巴西总统选举这一具有争议的政治时期，不同类型的网络新闻和媒体使用与选举误导信息信仰之间的关系。我们发现，在控制其他因素的情况下，随着时间的推移，使用传统新闻媒体的新闻与相信较少的选举误导相关。我们发现，使用数字新闻媒体和各种数字平台（包括 Facebook 和 WhatsApp）会产生无效或不一致的影响。此外，我们还发现对新闻的信任起到了重要的调节作用。对选举误导信息的信任反过来又会削弱对新闻的信任。总之，我们的研究结果证明了新闻媒体作为一个机构在遏制选举误导信息方面的重要作用，同时也强调了在有争议的政治时期新闻信任的不稳定性。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Public Opinion Quarterly Multiple-

CiteScore

4.40

自引率

2.90%

发文量

期刊介绍： Published since 1937, Public Opinion Quarterly is among the most frequently cited journals of its kind. Such interdisciplinary leadership benefits academicians and all social science researchers by providing a trusted source for a wide range of high quality research. POQ selectively publishes important theoretical contributions to opinion and communication research, analyses of current public opinion, and investigations of methodological issues involved in survey validity—including questionnaire construction, interviewing and interviewers, sampling strategy, and mode of administration. The theoretical and methodological advances detailed in pages of POQ ensure its importance as a research resource.