The Electoral Misinformation Nexus How News Consumption Platform Use

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 5, 2025, 9:54 PM

the electoral misinformation nexus how news consumption platform use

Please enter the email address that the record information will be sent to. Please add any additional information to be included within the email. If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record We require your email address in order to let you know the outcome of your enquiry. Please add any additional information to be included within the email. Corresponding author: Camila Mont’Alverne, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Lord Hope Building, 141 St James Road, Glasgow G4 0LT, UK; email: camila.montalverne@strath.ac.uk.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits noncommercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial reuse, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and electoral institutions—sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors—is a challenge to public confidence in elections specifically and democracy more... In this article, we analyze a combination of 42 million clicks in links and apps from behavioral tracking data of 2,200 internet users and a four-wave panel survey to investigate how different kinds of... We find that, controlling for other factors, using news from legacy news media is associated with belief in fewer claims of electoral misinformation over time. We find null or inconsistent effects for using digital-born news media and various digital platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp.

Furthermore, we find that trust in news plays a significant role as a moderator. Belief in electoral misinformation, in turn, undermines trust in news. Overall, our findings document the important role of the news media as an institution in curbing electoral misinformation, even as they also underline the precarity of trust in news during contentious political periods. Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and institutions—sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors—is a challenge to public trust in elections specifically and democracy more broadly... What role do different kinds of news consumption, digital platform use, and trust in news play in hindering or helping the spread of such electoral misinformation? These are the questions we address in this article.

The context is one in which the rapid growth of digital media, especially widely used platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and their competitors, and numerous documented cases of misinformation on many of them, has... As Nelson and Taneja (2018) have argued, “Social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news.” But others have suggested that those concerned about misinformation spread, and people’s belief in... As Tsfati et al. (2020) write, “Mainstream news media [play] a significant and important role in the dissemination of fake news” (see also Allen et al. 2020). While several empirical studies have cautioned that identified sources of false information are a small, even very small, part of most people’s media use (Watts, Rothschild, and Mobius 2021; Altay, Nielsen, and Fletcher 2022),...

We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us. Start searching for your way to change the world. The year 2024 has featured a series of pivotal and hotly contested elections around the world, and the U.S. presidential election — the campaign for which has gone through a whipsaw of a summer, to say the least — is still to come. The timing is right, then, to take stock of a key question that looms large: Why do so many people around the world express so little trust in elections, and what impact do news...

Enter this special issue of the esteemed journal Public Opinion Quarterly. It opens with an essay by the issue editors arguing that while the number of countries with elections has grown, the level of trust that voters express in the electoral process has fallen to... Capitol). “Political polarization, social divisions, and the rapid spread of misinformation have all been related to enhanced widespread skepticism about the quality of national elections,” the special issue editors write. But a lot of questions remain about the precise role of media and tech platforms in this global crisis of trust in elections. This is particularly so because, let’s face it, the information landscape has become wildly complicated and cacophonous in the digital era: long gone are the days when people typically relied on a few traditional...

Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and electoral institutions-sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors-is a challenge to public confidence in elections specifically and democracy more... In this article, we analyze a combination of 42 million clicks in links and apps from behavioral tracking data of 2,200 internet users and a four-wave panel survey to investigate how different kinds of... We find that, controlling for other factors, using news from legacy news media is associated with belief in fewer claims of electoral misinformation over time. We find null or inconsistent effects for using digital-born news media and various digital platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp. Furthermore, we find that trust in news plays a significant role as a moderator. Belief in electoral misinformation, in turn, undermines trust in news.

Overall, our findings document the important role of the news media as an institution in curbing electoral misinformation, even as they also underline the precarity of trust in news during contentious political periods. © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of American Association for Public Opinion Research. Distribution of frequency of use of legacy and digital-born brands. Predicted numbers of electoral misinformation… Predicted numbers of electoral misinformation claims respondents believed over time based on results…

New research shows the impact that social media algorithms can have on partisan political feelings, using a new tool that hijacks the way platforms rank content. How much does someone’s social media algorithm really affect how they feel about a political party, whether it’s one they identify with or one they feel negatively about? Until now, the answer has escaped researchers because they’ve had to rely on the cooperation of social media platforms. New, intercollegiate research published Nov. 27 in Science, co-led by Northeastern University researcher Chenyan Jia, sidesteps this issue by installing an extension on consenting participants’ browsers that automatically reranks the posts those users see, in real time and still... Jia and her team discovered that after one week, users’ feelings toward the opposing party shifted by about two points — an effect normally seen over three years — revealing algorithms’ strong influence on...

There is great public concern about the potential use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for political persuasion and the resulting impacts on elections and democracy1,2,3,4,5,6. We inform these concerns using pre-registered experiments to assess the ability of large language models to influence voter attitudes. In the context of the 2024 US presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election, we assigned participants randomly to have a conversation with an AI model that advocated... We observed significant treatment effects on candidate preference that are larger than typically observed from traditional video advertisements7,8,9. We also document large persuasion effects on Massachusetts residents’ support for a ballot measure legalizing psychedelics. Examining the persuasion strategies9 used by the models indicates that they persuade with relevant facts and evidence, rather than using sophisticated psychological persuasion techniques.

Not all facts and evidence presented, however, were accurate; across all three countries, the AI models advocating for candidates on the political right made more inaccurate claims. Together, these findings highlight the potential for AI to influence voters and the important role it might play in future elections. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription Receive 51 print issues and online access

The Electoral Misinformation Nexus How News Consumption Platform Use

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