The consequences of fake news

In our own research we've found that people's endorsement of coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation is an important predictor of their willingness to adopt public health measures. It predicted reduced willingness to get a vaccine once one is out there, and a reduced willingness to recommend the vaccine to other people. So misinformation in this space can be harmful because it can actually create vaccine hesitancy, which, as we know from prior issues, can actually compromise herd immunity, which is a massive danger to public health.

Then there are more subtle effects of fake news forming harmful stereotypes about other groups of people. For example, if you read a conspiracy theory about a group of people — typically a minority— you might start forming harmful stereotypes about that group. And we've heard things like “Chinese virus” being used as a way to manipulate people into forming negative feelings towards another group of people because they know that's where the coronavirus originated. So there is this harmful end product of misinformation that permeates different levels throughout the chain, whether it's direct effects on your health or indirect effects on your thoughts and beliefs.

Voter behaviour is actually quite complex. People vote for a variety of reasons, not just because of misinformation. But certainly it might be the case that people's belief in fake news contributes to the way they feel about a political candidate and the reasons why they voted.

This is where targeted fake news comes in. Voters who are undecided can be targeted on Facebook with fake news. The way this works is that you typically have a group of people on Facebook that are spreading or are susceptible to a certain kind of misinformation. Then you can ask Facebook for what is called a “lookalike audience”. These are people with the same characteristics on Facebook as the group that you've spotted, but who haven't yet been exposed to the content. They might be susceptible because they share characteristics with these other groups. Then you can target them with your ads. Research shows that people click on ads when you target them.

Ultimately what people end up doing at the voting booth is another question, but you can certainly see that it can be used for sinister and harmful purposes. It's not always to dupe people with the fake news itself. Sometimes it's just about voter suppression: disengaging people from politics and getting them to stay home. Sometimes it's just to create doubt in people's minds and inflame debates. Ultimately, I think the most damaging consequence on the societal level is the erosion of trust in media, government and official institutions. Because when people no longer have trust, that's really starting to get at the fabric of democracy.

Misinformation about climate change is an existential risk. When people are misled on that issue, it could have huge consequences for the future of the planet. So even though we're not talking about people dying from misinformation at the moment, in some ways, misinformation about climate change is actually one of the most dangerous kinds because it interferes with people's ability to correctly understand how we need to navigate the planet to try to preserve it.

There's a petition out there. It's a real website and it says: 30,000 scientists have signed this petition saying global warming isn't happening. What we found was that just exposing people to that website can have damaging consequences for people's perception of whether the science is settled on the issue of climate change and whether or not it's happening. But also, when we paired it with the facts, what happened was that that piece of misinformation completely cancelled out the facts. So, if we expose people to the facts about climate change, they update their beliefs in the right direction. But once you introduce this piece of misinformation, it completely neutralises the positive effect of facts. That was quite a shocking revelation.

In some of our other work, we've exposed people to videos about conspiracy theories on climate change. What we found was that just a 30-second video talking about how global warming is a hoax, with some sinister music in the background, not only made people less likely to think that there was a scientific consensus on the issue of global warming but also less likely to sign a global warming petition.

Fake news about climate change comes in various forms, but it can be very harmful for people's judgements and the actual decisions that they make on the issue.

The anti-science and anti-elite element is often not so much about the science itself, but about what the science implies for public life and public policy. Different groups in society question different kinds of science because the implications are different.

For example, what do climate change and the coronavirus have in common? With both, the implication of the science is that we need to do something that involves government intervention and restricting people's personal freedom, whether through self-isolation, quarantining, restriction of shopping and visiting friends, wearing a mask or personal sacrifices like driving less, flying less, eating less meat and so on. For those individuals in society who have strong free market ideologies or strong personal views towards freedom, the science isn't really the issue. It's what the science implies for their personal and public lives.

That's why you see a lot of distrust and resistance and why fake news and misinformation can play into that. With other kinds of science issues, it's not so much government intervention that is the underlying issue, but it could be big corporations that are going to be the target of the distrust. It's not the nitty gritty of the science itself, but what the science implies for people's lives.