Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult for people to identify false or misleading news, and the limited number of coronavirus news stories in our collection are no exception. We also sent these articles separately to six independent fact-checkers, and treated their most common response — true, false/misleading, or cannot determine — for each article as the “correct’’ answer for that article. People aren’t good at identifying false news.
When shown an article that was rated “true” by the professional fact-checkers, respondents correctly identified the article as true 62 percent of the time. Although accidental releases of pathogens from labs have previously caused significant morbidity and mortality, in the current pandemic multiple pieces of evidence suggest this virus is of natural origin. AD
When we asked people to rate the veracity of these four articles, the results mirrored those from the full study: Only 30 percent of participants correctly classified them as false or misleading.This figure shows the percent of responses that correctly identified false and/or misleading news, by education level, looking at both coronavirus-related news stories and stories on topics not related to covid-19. This figure shows the percent of responses that correctly identified false and/or misleading news, by education level, looking at both coronavirus-related news stories and stories on topics not related to covid-19. Nothing we saw in our data suggested the potential for misinformation on covid-19 was any lower than the overall findings — though it’s important to note that our study did not include misinformation related to cures or treatments.
Read more on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/07/its-not-easy-ordinary-citizens-identify-fake-news/
