Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 US Election

Abstract

Prior research has documented exposure to fake news and online misinformation using large- scale data on individuals’ media use, which has provided important information about the scope and nature of people’s exposure to misinformation online. However, most of this work has made use of data collected during the 2016 US election, and far fewer studies have examined how exposure to misinformation online has changed since 2016. In this paper, we examine exposure to untrustworthy websites in the lead up to the 2020 US election using a dataset of over 7.5 million passively tracked website visits from a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 1,151). We find that a significantly smaller percentage of Americans were exposed to untrustworthy websites in 2020 compared to in 2016 (as calculated by Guess et al. [2020]). While exposure was concentrated among similar groups of people as it was in 2016, levels of exposure appear to be lower across the board. There were also differences in the role online platforms played in directing people to untrustworthy websites in 2020 compared to 2016. Our findings have implications for future research and practice around online misinformation.

Effects of Misinformation on Election Beliefs: Disentangling Motivated Reasoning from Selective Exposure

“…in the browsing data by matching the domains the participants visited with a list of known misinformation sites (Moore et al 2022). We also conducted a supplemental analysis where we only examined misinformation website visits that refer specifically to the election, finding similar results (see Supporting Information E).…”

“…One crucial question that remains surprisingly understudied is how exposure to misinformation online affects downstream beliefs . For example, while recent research has revealed that millions of Americans were exposed to misinformation on the internet during the 2016 (e.g., Allen et al 2020; and 2020 (Moore et al 2022) elections, it is unclear how these exposures influenced people's beliefs about the election.…”

“…This distinction is important because although selective exposure can lead people to seek out and consume misinformation Moore et al 2022), it is less clear whether motivated reasoning influences belief change once an individual is exposed to misinformation. While prior work demonstrates that selective exposure predisposes an individual to seek out congenial misinformation (e.g., conservatives are more likely to visit conservative-oriented misinformation, and liberals are more likely to visit liberal-oriented misinformation), it is unclear what the effect of misinformation on beliefs is once a person is exposed to it.…”

“…Specifically, we collected information on every website participants visited for eleven weeks surrounding the election. We matched these observed website visits to known misinformation websites (Moore et al 2022) to identify individuals' exposure. We integrated this web-browsing behavior with demographic information and political beliefs collected via a two-wave survey, including a measure of the false belief that the election was fraudulent, assessed approximately one month after election day and three weeks after the result was declared.…”

Misinformation Paradox

“…This may have impacted the spread of and engagement with misinformation during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, during which time prior work found that older adults were heavily engaged with, exposed to, or shared misinformation on Twitter in 2019 (Grinberg et al 2019), and seven times more likely to share information from fake news sources on Facebook (Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019). This trend has persisted, with studies examining the period between 2016 and 2018 (Allen et al 2020) as well as the period leading up to the 2020 presidential election in the United States (Moore, Dahlke, and Hancock 2022) continuing to find that older adults are more likely to read or visit websites containing misinformation.…”