Compared to research on the 2016 election, preliminary findings on coronavirus misinformation suggest more people are seeing—and believing—misinformation now. It may have something to do with the challenge of understanding a new disease.
Many Americans are also having difficulty discerning accurate information. For example, in the Cornell paper, when shown headlines about treatments for COVID-19, 40 percent of respondents, on average, judged real headlines in this category to be true, and the remaining 60 percent were “almost evenly divided between identifying the headline as false or acknowledging that they were unsure.
” “If people are unable to discern and say that true information is true, that is a real problem from a public health perspective,” said Sarah Kreps, a government and law professor at Cornell and a co-author of the paper., respondents were able to distinguish between accurate and false information about COVID-19 pretty well when prompted to. But when asked only whether they would share the information on social media — and not if they believe it to be true or not — more were willing to share fake news. “They still only believe true content like 65-ish percent of the time and the false content they believe like 25 percent of the time, so not great but at least there’s a difference,” Pennycook said. “If instead you ask them which ones they would share on social media, they’re terrible at discerning between them. They don’t, basically.” One of the reasons we might be seeing more people falling for misinformation is the knowledge gap that comes with an emerging disease like COVID-19. There’s a lot we still don’t know about this virus, and that lack of understanding can create a vacuum that is all too easily filled by conspiracy theories and misinformation. “An analogy that might be helpful here is autism: science still doesn’t have a clear explanation of why autism occurs,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College who studies disinformation. “That’s created a demand for explanations of why children develop it that anti-vaccine activists have taken advantage of. They’ve provided a simple story of why children develop autism, taking advantage of the coincidence in time between when autism manifests and when children get vaccines.” So what do we do while we wait for better scientific answers on COVID-19? Social media sites, for their part, have
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