In the run-up to the 2020 election, people appear to have become better at spotting misinformation online, according to a study that found a decline in clicks on unreliable websites.
According to prior research, some 44.3% of Americans visited websites during the 2016 US election that repeatedly made false or misleading information. During the 2020 election, that number dropped by nearly half to 26.2%.
While these findings are promising, the researchers are cautious in interpreting the results. Exposure even among fewer people can still have serious consequences, they note in the new paper in Nature Human Behaviour.
Extrapolating their results, they estimated that nearly 68 million Americans made a total of 1.5 billion visits to untrustworthy websites during the 2020 election.
“Although we saw a serious reduction in the overall number of people exposed to misinformation on the web, misinformation remains a serious problem in the information ecosystem for some populations, especially older adults and diverse communities,” says senior author Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford University.
The researchers found that those who did visit websites touting false claims tended to be older and lean more to the right of the political spectrum, a finding consistent with 2016 data. They did however visit fewer untrustworthy websites and spend less time on them than they did in 2016.
MISINFORMATION PURVEYORS TARGET OLDER ADULTS
The study builds on previous research...
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