Media Literacy or Media Skepticism? Testing Novel Trust-Preserving Media Literacy Interventions

Political misinformation is a significant problem affecting individuals and society. Proposed solutions include reactive measures (fact-checking, post flagging and removal) designed to contain the consequences of circulating misinformation, and pre-emptive measures limiting misinformation acceptance and exposure in the first place, including gamified inoculation and news literacy programs. The latter attract attention for their wider scope and ability to foster critical thinking and assertive postures to citizenship without involving censorship nor infringing free press rights. Following this promise, public institutions and digital media platforms in the U.S. and Europe are supporting media literacy programs. However, recent evidence raises concerns that such news literacy interventions may not only increase skepticism in false and misleading news, but also have negative spillover effects on true news by either reducing the perceived accuracy of true news or decrease trust in otherwise trusted news outlets. The presence of these negative spillovers is deeply concerning since – outside of the experimental setting – true news makes up the largest part of people’s news diet. While many interventions aimed at combatting misinformation focus on increasing individuals' ability to recognize and identify false news stories, we contend that it is equally or even more important to bolster individuals' trust in and acceptance of accurate news sources. The ability to differentiate between accurate and inaccurate information (i.e., discernment) is important, but it is insufficient if individuals lack the confidence and trust in reliable news sources needed to make informed decisions. Existing interventions that have proven effective at increasing discernment with an equal proportion of true and false news may unintentionally be undermining the benefits of trust in real news and inflating the benefits of skepticism toward false news. When tested with more realistic proportions of true and false news, these interventions may actually increase skepticism in both true and false news, ultimately diminishing individuals' confidence in reliable news sources. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, we investigate the effects of two improved news media literacy interventions on false and true news acceptance, as well as on the broader trust in news sources. We do so by conducting an online survey-experiment in the US (n = 4000), and contrast a traditional intervention focusing on skepticism-centered tips, with two novel interventions emphasizing the continued prevalence of trustworthy (online) news. The first of the two trust-preserving interventions mixes classic skepticism-centered tips and newly designed trust-inducing tips, while the second one only focuses on the importance of trusting reliable sources. These two interventions may overcome the negative spill-over effects induced by conventional news literacy interventions. If successful, our findings have direct policy implications to public institutions and media organizations offering media literacy programs. In designing the experiment, we aim to include realistic proportions of false and real news, deviating from common research designs which have predominantly tested the effectiveness of interventions using similar proportions of true and false news (50/50). Given the interest of policymakers and platforms to implement these interventions it is crucial to address this potential methodological problem.