The Demand for Fact Checking

Felix Chopra, Ingar Haaland and Christopher Roth

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

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 JEL Classification: D83; D91; L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-isf
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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp563.2021.pdf

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:cge:wacage:563

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