14/ Summary article on Cristian's blog: cristianvaccari.com/2023/01/10/n...

Summary article on my blog: www.andrewchadwick.com/blog/2022/12...

13/ It has important implications. Do we really want radically weakened public service media organizations?

12/ We call this the “campaign disinformation divide”—between getting news from professional journalistic organizations and news from social media.

11/ Use of tabloid news, on its own and not as part of a broader diet of professional news, was linked with being worse at recognising disinformation.

10/ False news, once perceived as accurate, was more likely to be shared than true news. To explore our results further, we did a number of additional tests where we isolated individual sources rather than combine them together.

9/ These differences also shaped the intention to share true versus false news.

8/ Conversely, the more that respondents used social media for campaign news, the less they were able to distinguish true from false information.

7/ The key findings: the more that respondents received their political campaign news via professional news organizations, the more they were able to distinguish true from false information.

6/ We used two surveys of samples mirroring the adult population (total 4,018).

5/ We also wanted to examine whether there were any connections between discerning true and false news and sharing those types of news on social media.

4/ We were interested in testing whether the different kinds of news diets people in the UK consume might differentially equip them to discern between true and false news.

3/ Cristian Vaccari, Johannes Kaiser, and I (fairly) recently published a study in the journal Political Communication.

2/ Here's one bit of evidence.

... we're heading to another one of those all-too-familiar moments when we collectively reflect on how we were once promised a shiny future that didn't transpire.

And that's putting aside for a moment the environmental costs, which could be considerable.