GenAI Misinformation, Trust, and News Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Filipe Campante, Ruben Durante, Felix Hagemeister and Ananya Sen

No 34100, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study how AI-generated misinformation affects demand for trustworthy news, using data from a field experiment by a major German outlet, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). Readers were randomly assigned to a treatment highlighting the challenge of distinguishing real from AI-generated images. The treatment raised concern with misinformation (0.3 s.d.) and reduced trust in news (0.1 s.d.), including SZ. Importantly, it affected post-survey browsing behavior: daily visits to SZ digital content rose by 2.5% in the immediate aftermath of the treatment. Moreover, we find that subscriber retention increased by 1.1% after five months, corresponding to about a one-third drop in attrition rate. Results are consistent with a model where the relative value of trustworthy news sources increases with the prevalence of misinformation, which may thus boost engagement with those sources even while lowering trust in news content.

JEL-codes: D12 L82 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-exp and nep-soc
Note: POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34100.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34100

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34100
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().