Misinformation in the Space Age

Abstract: The work of libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, as facilitators of reliable information
on health issues, has shown that these entities can play an active role as verification agents in the
fight against disinformation (false information that is intended to mislead), focusing on media and
informational literacy.

Preface, Introduction: Why is everyone biased but me?, and Chapter One: What is bias and why does it matter?

ABSTRACT. Sorting fact from fiction has become a concern in an age of digital information overload and deliberate disinformation campaigns. In particular, people may lose track of critical source information when browsing news stories encountered through a social media feed. Individual differences in information processing styles, such as need for cognition and choice maximization, may influence how people approach the task of judging the veracity of news information. To test how well people sort fact from fiction without source information, we created a quiz that included excerpts from 20 different news articles that appeared somewhere on the internet from 2017–2018.

Sample from Introduction: The spread of mis- and disinformation is an increasing concern for democratic societies around the globe (Lazer et al., 2019). In modern high-choice media environments, exposure to misinformation can be harmful and can have negative consequences for democratic governance as well as trust in news media and journalism more broadly (e.g., Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Chesney & Citron, 2018; Nisbet et al., 2021; Ognyanova et al., 2020; Vaccari & Chadwick, 2020).