Alternative Counter-News Use and Fake News Recall During the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a massive flood of “fake news”, conspiracy theories, and distorted information more generally. Alternative news media have been accused of contributing to this pollution the information sphere. In this article, we argue that audiences with a counter-hegemonic, ideologically biased worldview are particularly likely to use alternative counter-news, because these outlets validate their worldview ― and worldview validation being a relevant psychological need in times of crises. We suggest that by turning to alternative counter-news, audiences increase their exposure to fake news and end up being less well informed about important events. Results of a random-quota survey in Germany (N = 967) confirmed that those with higher levels of conspiracy mentality and lower media trust were more likely to use alternative counter-news. Alternative counter-news users recalled more fake news than non-users and alternative counter-news use partially mediated the relationship between counter-hegemonic attitudes and fake news recall. Thus, although not all content in alternative counter-news is fake news, these outlets do attract a specific counter-hegemonic audience and they do contribute to the “pollution” of the information ecosystem.

Keywords:

• alternative news media
• alternative counter-news
• authoritarianism
• conspiracy mentality
• coronavirus
• COVID-19
• differential susceptibility to media effects
• fake news
• trust

Acknowledgements

Data for this study was collected by Respondi. The data is part of a larger research project, entailing amongst others the Master thesis of the second author at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. We thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for the constructive feedback throughout the process.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The formulation of the hypotheses was slightly edited for language clarity but not regarding the content of our pre-registered expectations.

2 We run factor analyses to scrutinize the unidimensionality of or multi-item dispositional susceptibility variables. The results confirmed unidimensionality and we provide them in the Supplementary material.

3 Although we forgot to describe the recall variable in our pre-registration, we did include it in the analysis plan and uploaded a full version of the survey before data collection, for which reason we consider the analysis to be confirmatory.

4 We also pre-registered analyses using non-proprietary news as outcome. For the sake of transparency, we report these analyses in the Supplementary material (see Table C). Neither media trust nor conspiracy mentality predicted the use of non-proprietary news sources.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia under the number 005-1709-001, project: 1706dgn001.