Fake news is pernicious as it spreads misleading and false information. Lazer et al.1 distinguish between misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (false information that is purposely spread to deceive people). In both information contexts, fake news is likely to promote misperceptions. Recent studies show that the information overload during the COVID-19 pandemic increased the likelihood of fake news sharing by increasing consumers' psychological strain2,3. By altering people's perceptions and attitudes, fake news can shape public debates about critical policy issues such as vaccinations or immigration. For instance, Allcott and Gentzkow4 suggest that in the 2016 presidential election in the United States, fake news had a considerable impact and could even have been crucial in determining the election's outcome. Brady et al.5 contend that moral-emotional language in political messages substantially increases their diffusion within (and less so between) ideological group boundaries.
Finally, we asked the retrospective questions of whether the respondents had shared fake news stories accidentally or deliberately in the past; this allowed us to check whether respondents had a good assessment of their sharing behavior. We compare the responses to the retrospective questions with the actual behavior in the experiment with the headlines. Due to the general overconfidence, we expect a low correlation between actual and perceived accidental sharing, i.e., low awareness of being a distributor of fake news. With respect to deliberate sharing, we hypothesize that respondents are frank about their behavior. Those who do not admit their deliberate sharing for reasons of social desirability will also mask this behavior in the experimental setting.
Individual determinants of fake news detection and sharing
Table 3 Detecting and sharing fake news by country.
Full size table
We next differentiate between deliberate and accidental fake news sharing. We have constructed two scales based on the five fake news statements. The first scale is deliberate sharing meaning a respondent recognizes fake news but wants to share it anyway. The higher the number, the more deliberate sharing there is; the maximum is five meaning that a respondent identified five headlines as fake and wanted to share all of them. The second scale refers to accidental sharing; it measures the number of fake news statements that were not recognized as fake, and the respondent wanted to share them.
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