this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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I'm not sure this is a good study. I mean I scored 85% so woohoo but you just get headlines to go off. The art of noticing disinformation is in reading articles and making inferences on them. Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline but I'd imagine the article itself would fall apart on first reading. I know half the problem is people don't read articles but this is a very simplistic survey.
Just took a look here, and yeah. One of the headlines they ask you to rate is "Hyatt Will Remove Small Bottles from Hotel Bathrooms". It's the kind of thing that's basically a coin flip. Without having any context into the story, I have no opinion on whether it's fake or not. I don't think guessing incorrectly on this one would indicate somebody is any more or less susceptible to miscategorizing stories as real/fake.
I assume the idea is to include some pointless headlines (such as this) in order to provide some sort of baseline. The researcher probably extracts several dimensions from the variables, and I assume this headline would feed into a "general scepticism" variable that measures he likelihood that the respondent will lean towards things being fake rather than real.
Still, I'm not at all convinced about this research design.
I suspect that where you select on the extremely liberal to extremely conservative spectrum might have a correlation to which fake news titles you fall for. What sounds like obvious propaganda to you may sound like any news article that some may see from a more sensationalist less reliable news source, especially to those predisposed to conspiracy theories.