ABSTRACT
During COVID-19, fake news on social media seriously threatened public health. As a solution to this problem, this study examined how social media exposure patterns affect people being deeply harmed by fake news. Based on cognitive dissonance theory, this study investigated the effect of intentional and incidental exposure on belief in fake news through the mediating role of confirmation bias. The results show that intentional exposure positively influences confirmation bias and belief in fake news. Incidental exposure is the opposite. Our results also show that intentional exposure and confirmation bias negatively influence incidental exposure. Furthermore, these relationships remain unchanged by gender. This study provides theoretical and empirical contributions to reducing people's belief in fake news.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 highlighted America's federalist structure as the dissemination of pandemic information was frequently left to states and localities. For some citizens, this was a welcome relief from national-level policymaking and political narratives, though others argued that the federal government was failing to live up to its obligations. We identify three reasons for variation in Americans' trust in information from different levels of government: partisanship, ideology, and state identity. Using data from a representative online survey of more than one thousand people, we demonstrate that each individual characteristic shaped respondents' trust in leaders to provide pandemic information. Partisanship and ideology played major roles in information trust at both the national and state level, but individuals' psychological attachment to their state and to the nation also shaped their trust in the federated information environment.
ABSTRACT
In direct democracies, voters are faced with considerable information demands. Although search engines are an important gateway to political information, it is still unclear what role they play in citizens' information behavior regarding referendum campaigns. Moreover, few studies have examined the search terms that citizens use when searching for political information and the potential "user‐input biases” in this regard. Therefore, we investigate to what extent citizens search online for information about upcoming referendums and what differences emerge between proponents, opponents, and non‐voters regarding the search terms they used and the results they visited, related to three national ballot proposals voted on in Switzerland on November 28, 2021. The study combines cross‐sectional survey data with longitudinal digital trace data containing participants' Google Search histories obtained through data donations. Our findings show that participants rarely used Google to search for information about upcoming referendums. Moreover, most ballot‐related searches employed rather neutral search terms. Nevertheless, a qualitative analysis of the search terms points to differences between different voting groups, particularly for the most prominent proposal around a Covid‐19 law. The study provides interesting insight into how citizens search for information online during national referendum campaigns. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal).
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a torrent of conspiracy theories across different social media platforms. Parallel to this conspiracy wave was a heightened sense of nationalism, which manifested through both in-group solidarity and perceived out-group threats. In this study, we examine how individuals' use of government social media to gather political information correlated with nation-related conspiracy beliefs during the pandemic. Data were collected from 745 subjects in China and analyzed through path analyses, which allowed us to examine the direct association with political information consumption from government social media and the indirect association with nationalism on conspiracy beliefs. The results indicated that the use of government social media to gather political information was associated with greater beliefs in nation-variant COVID-19 conspiracies, both directly and through different mediations of nationalism. Our findings highlight the importance of examining government social media use and how nationalism can have differentiated mediation effects on beliefs in conspiracy theories. © The Author(s) 2023.