A different touch of fake: propensity to believe “fake news” in the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is a common belief among researchers that access to the Internet and social media promotes the diffusion and circulation of “fake news” - defined as ‘fabricated information presented as the truth’ (Celliers 2020: 2) often to pursue political objectives – both at the national and the international level. While there is little doubt that politicians have always distorted the truth in order to gain or maintain consensus, having a direct access to the electorate through social media allows them to elude the ‘gatekeeping’ control of journalists and mainstream media (Tsfati et al. 2020). In addition, search engines and social media create, through well-known phenomena of echo-chambers and filter bubbles, the ideal environments for the same information –true or false- to circulate (and to generate profit) without fear of being disproved (Sunstein 2017). Despite the many questions that remain unanswered concerning fake news, a strikingly fascinating aspect regards the relation of public opinion with plausible fake news. It is our claim that fake news exists in various degrees of plausibility: from blatant conspiracy theory – i.e. the infamous ‘pizza gate’ - to more subtle, somewhat likely but still untrue piece of information - i.e. drinking orange juice helps avoiding catching Covid-19. The varying plausibility of fake news could help explain seemingly inconsistent findings in the literature: for instance, the fact that the majority of citizens seems to be able to recognize a (blatant) fake news as incorrect or distorted information, but it is also prone to believe (and, to a lesser extent, share) it. To address our research question, we distributed a quantitative online survey among a non-representative sample of Italian respondents (in particular to students and younger adults) testing the propensity to believe fake news regarding the Covid-19-induced pandemic. In order to control for the evolution of the pandemic and information on it we submitted the survey two times to different samples: in March and in September 2020 and in early spring of 2021. Indeed, we selected some fake news in varying degree of plausibility and related to different issues and asked our respondents to assess the truthfulness of the information. By means of ordinal logistic regression, we develop a model investigating the role of political attitudes on the propensity to believe to fake news (controlling for socio-demographic variables). Among the other findings, we see that appreciation for populist leaders is associated with being more prone to believe blatant fake news, but such effect vanishes the more plausible the fake news becomes.