Digital literacy does not predict people's likelihood of sharing false news

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- When it comes to false news and misinformation, are some people more susceptible than others?

A new study by an MIT team led by Sloan School of Management Prof. David Rand found that digital literacy is a good predictor of people's ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. However, digital literacy – fluency with basic technological concepts related to the internet – does not predict whether people will share true versus false news.

"It's important to understand the connection between digital literacy and susceptibility to false information and fake news, especially in relation to topics like COVID-19 and politics where the consequences can be significant. There is concern that people who fall for fake news – and share it with others – have low digital literacy and play a large role in spreading misinformation on social media. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence one way or the other about this," says Rand.

To shed light on the connection between digital literacy and misinformation, Rand and his colleagues surveyed 1,341 Americans, matching the national distribution on age, gender, ethnicity, and geographic region. They examined the association between two different measures of digital literacy and two outcome measures, belief and sharing, for true versus false news about politics and COVID-19.

The study found that both digital literacy measures were independently predictive of the tendency to rate true news as more accurate than false news. In other words, digitally literate people were more likely to successfully tell the difference between true and false news. This association was equivalent for news about politics and COVID-19, and regardless of participants' political partisanship.

"The pattern is strikingly different when it comes to the connection between digital literacy and people's tendency to share fake news," says Nathaniel Sirlin, a research assistant at MIT Sloan. "Neither digital literacy measure was consistently associated with sharing discernment. People with both low and high digital literacy were just as likely to share true news as false news." As in the prior finding, the result was the same regardless of political partisanship or whether the topic was politics or COVID-19.

So why was digital literacy associated with the ability to tell truth from falsehood, but not with what people would share? "Prior work suggests that people often forget to think about whether news is accurate or not before they share it. So it may be that even if more digitally literate people are better at identifying falsehoods, they still end up sharing misinformation because they forget to think about whether the news is true or false when deciding what to share," says Rand.

He adds, "If you're trying to figure out who will fall for misinformation, then digital literacy may be helpful. But if you want to know who will spread misinformation, it is not so helpful. It would be better to get people to pay more attention to accuracy in the first place, to think before they click 'share' on social media."

Rand, Sirlin, Ziv Epstein of the MIT Media Lab, and Antonio Arechar of MIT Sloan coauthored "Digital literacy is associated with more discerning accuracy judgments but not sharing intentions," which was published in November 2021 in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world. Learn more at mitsloan.mit.edu.

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SOURCE MIT Sloan School of Management