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Search engine audit studies—where researchers query a set of terms in one or more search engines and analyze the results—have long been instrumental in assessing the relative reliability of search engines. However, on alt-tech platforms, users often conduct a different form of search engine audit.

Competing hypotheses exist on how conservative political ideology is associated with susceptibility to misinformation. We performed a secondary analysis of responses from 1,721 participants from twelve countries in a study that investigated the effects of climate disinformation and six psychological interventions to protect participants against such disinformation.

Research on digital misinformation has turned its attention to large language models (LLMs) and their handling of sensitive political topics. Through an AI audit, we analyze how three LLM-powered chatbots (Perplexity, Google Bard, and Bing Chat) generate content in response to the prompts linked to common Russian disinformation narratives about the war in Ukraine.

This study integrates research on negativity bias and misinformation, as a comparison of how systematic (negativity) and incidental (misinformation) challenges to the news are perceived differently by audiences. Through a cross-country survey, we found that both challenges are perceived as highly salient and disruptive.

Psychological inoculation interventions, which seek to pre-emptively build resistance against unwanted persuasion attempts, have shown promise in reducing susceptibility to misinformation. However, as many people receive news from popular, mainstream ingroup sources (e.g., a left-wing person consuming left-wing media) which may host misleading or false content, and as ingroup sources may be more persuasive, the impact of source effects on inoculation interventions demands attention.

Statements of fact can be proved or disproved with objective evidence, whereas statements of opinion depend on personal values and preferences. Distinguishing between these types of statements contributes to information competence. Conversely, failure at fact-opinion differentiation potentially brings resistance to corrections of misinformation and susceptibility to manipulation.

In a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,009 conservative Republicans, we evaluated an intervention that framed accurate perceptions of information as consistent with a conservative political identity and conservative values (e.g., patriotism, respect for tradition, and religious purity). The intervention caused participants to report placing greater value on accuracy, and placing greater value on accuracy was correlated with successfully rating true headlines as more accurate than false headlines.

This study explores U.S. adults’ media consumption—in terms of the average bias and reliability of the media outlets participants report referencing—and the extent to which those participants hold inaccurate beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination. Notably, we used a novel means of capturing the (left-right) bias and reliability of audiences’ media consumption, leveraging the Ad Fontes Media ratings of 129 news sources along each dimension.

Using survey data from 154,195 respondents in 142 countries, we investigate internet user perceptions of the risks associated with being exposed to misinformation. We find that: 1) The majority of regular internet users globally (58.5%) worry about misinformation, and young and low-income groups are most likely to be concerned. 2) Risk perception among internet users varies starkly across regions whereby concern is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (74.2%), and lowest in South Asia (31.2%). 3)