Feeling Misinformed? The Role of Perceived Difficulty in Evaluating Information Online in News Avoidance and News Fatigue

ABSTRACT

As misinformation has become a prominent topic in U.S. politics, Americans have become increasingly concerned about the problem that misinformation poses. Correspondingly, people have become weary of news media, with some actively avoiding news media and political information. While many situational and contextual factors contribute to news avoidance, this study considers how the feeling of being misinformed online might to contribute to related news attitudes and behaviors, like active news avoidance and news fatigue. Using panel data from a three-wave survey of U.S. adults collected during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we find that feeling misinformed online is a widely felt phenomenon in the U.S. that is associated with increased active news avoidance and news fatigue overtime. We also find that strong partisans in the U.S. asymmetrically shift their news media use when they feel misinformed online; with strong Democrats relying more on non-partisan news media and strong Republicans using less news media overall, including less conservative news media.

KEYWORDS:

• News avoidance
• partisan media
• feeling misinformed online
• news use
• news media
• news fatigue

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the supplemental information file for further analyses and discussion on the difference between misinformation perceptions and feeling misinformed online.

2 The data are available at: https://osf.io/5jf3u/?view_only=1f6e1f713b8349bb9a4b1202355be440

3 We opted to not use our measures of online news media use as measure of passive news avoidance, as many studies do (Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020). This is because our measure only uses 61 online news sources; though they tend to be among the most popular news sources, they do not include local news, newspapers, and television, or other sources of news like social media and podcasts. Because of this, it is difficult to say that a participant avoids news, even passively, simply because they do use the news sources included in our survey (e.g., Van den Bulck, 2006).