In 203 of the 303 cases, participants displayed a positive response bias: they were more skeptical of true news than they were gullible towards false news. However, the average effect is relatively small.
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We also tested several moderators, among which the political concordance of news (e.g. pro-republican news rated by republicans are coded as concordant).
We find that participants were equally able to discern concordant and discordant news (left side) but they were more skeptical of discordant headlines (right side)
This suggests that interventions aimed at reducing partisan motivated reasoning, or at improving political reasoning in general, should focus more on increasing openness to opposing viewpoints than on increasing skepticism towards concordant viewpoints.
In sum, our findings lend support to crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives, and suggest that, to improve discernment, there may be more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of fact-checked false news.
Important limitation: Most studies used FACT-CHECKED false news. Anecdotally, three US studies included in the meta-analysis that automated their news selection found (i) a positive but lower discernment than our meta-analytic average, and (ii) a negative skepticism (i.e. a gullibility) bias.
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The fix is in. A born rich lying billionaire is in charge of the government he profits from.
Automated news samples and larger, more diverse, news pools are needed to generalize our findings from ‘fact-checked false news’ to ‘misinformation’.