Misinformation Speaker Series
The Speaker Series on Misinformation invites academic experts in the fields of mis- and disinformation research to present their research. The series is co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the NULab at Northeastern University, and the Internet Democracy Initiative
Fall 2024 Events
Jason Reifler
Host: Internet Democracy Initiative
Date: Thursday, October 17th
Time: 11 a.m.-12 p.m.
Location: Zoom Webinar
Arvind Narayanan
Host: Shorenstein Center
Date: Wednesday, November 20th
Time: 2 – 3 p.m.
Location: Zoom Webinar
Ceren Budak
Host: Shorenstein Center
Date: Thursday, December 5th
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: HKS campus & Zoom
Vish Viswanath
Host: Internet Democracy Initiative
Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: TBD
Correction mismatch? Do inattention and selective exposure limit the effects of media-led voter fraud debunking?
John Carey (Dartmouth College), Brian Fogarty (University of Notre Dame), Mathieu Lavigne (Dartmouth College), Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth College), Jason Reifler (University of Southampton)
Why are high-profile misperceptions so persistent? Accurate information is widely available online and yet false and unsupported claims about issues like climate change and health care endure for years. This disjunction, we argue, is caused by “correction mismatch” — people’s lack of exposure to relevant correction information, which has been demonstrated to reduce misperceptions in past experiments. We examine this phenomenon in the context of false claims of widespread voter fraud with U.S. data from 2020–2022. Results using nationally representative experimental and observational data indicate that exposure to corrective information reduces fraud misperceptions. Turning to online behavior data we examine exposure to fraud claims at the article level and try to estimate to how often people encountered corrective information from fact-checkers or in mainstream news, especially among people who are predisposed to believe in these claims. The persistence of misperceptions, in other words, may be driven more by the information that people encounter than by their response when they encounter it.