The Demand for Fact-Checking

Felix Chopra, Ingar Haaland and Christopher Roth

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

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 factchecking 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: factchecking reduces demand among respondents with strong ideological views and increases demand among ideologically moderate respondents. Furthermore, factchecking 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
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/w ... werp_1357_-_roth.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: The Demand for Fact-Checking (2021)
Working Paper: The Demand for Fact Checking (2021)
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:wrk:warwec:1357

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Margaret Nash ().