Others are more vulnerable than me. Third person perceptions about the ability to detect misleading content in the media

Various forms of misleading information have proliferated on digital media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic, when news consumption increased substantially. Several studies tackle the effects of exposure to misleading information among the general population and the effectiveness of measures intended to reduce the spread of misleading content. Nevertheless, such studies largely neglect the fact that more informed and educated people are also self-confident and subject to strong third person perceptions about their ability to detect misleading content than less educated ones. In this specific context, the present study investigates some understudied media-related aspects of third person perception about fake news detection, specifically (frequency of) news consumption, trust in the media, belief in conspiracy theories circulating in the media, and diversity of media diet (i.e., how open or closed to opposed views people are). By means of a national survey (N=1006) conducted in Romania in October 2020, we explore the intensity of the third person effect for close and distant others and the role played by both mainstream and online media in this context. Main findings show that frequency of news consumption, trust in the media, and belief in conspiracy theories decrease the perceptual gap between self and others, while education and diversity of the media diet intensifies it. Our study suggests that the third person effect about the ability to detect misleading information in the media is particularly important because it might explain why more informed and educated people are sometimes more vulnerable when exposed to misleading information. This vulnerability could be linked to the fact that, by being overconfident in their own ability to detect misleading information, such people no longer question the media content they are exposed to. This could make fact-checkers rather irrelevant in fighting misleading information, in the absence of a coherent and plausible awareness campaign, targeting all the segments of the general population. In other words, such results could offer insights into the sophisticated mechanisms that influence people’s willingness to ultimately check the information they come across in the media. Specifically, they could be useful when designing policy strategies to make fact-checking more successful in reducing the potentially harmful effects of misleading information.