The Demand for Fact-Checking

Felix Chopra, Ingar K. Haaland and Christopher Roth

No 9061, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Using a large-scale online experiment with more than 8,000 U.S. respondents, we examine how the demand for a politics newsletter changes when the newsletter content is fact-checked. We first document an overall muted demand for fact-checking when the newsletter features stories from an ideologically aligned source, even though fact-checking increases the perceived accuracy of the newsletter. The average impact of fact-checking masks substantial heterogeneity by ideology: fact-checking reduces demand among respondents with strong ideological views and increases demand among ideologically moderate respondents. Furthermore, fact-checking increases demand among all respondents when the newsletter features stories from an ideologically non-aligned source.

Keywords: fact-checking; news consumption; information; media bias; belief polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 D91 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Related works:
Working Paper: The Demand for Fact Checking (2021)
Working Paper: The Demand for Fact-Checking (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9061

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