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Can Fighting Misinformation Have a Negative Spillover Effect? How Warnings for the Threat of Misinformation Can Decrease General News Credibility
Open accessAbstract
In the battle against misinformation, do negative spillover effects of communicative efforts intended to protect audiences from inaccurate information exist?Given the relatively limited prevalence of misinformation in people's news diets, this study explores if the heightened salience of misinformation as a persistent societal threat can have an unintended spillover effect by decreasing the credibility of factually accurate news.Using an experimental design (N = 1305), we test whether credibility ratings of factually accurate news are subject to exposure to misinformation, corrective information, misinformation warnings, and news media literacy (NML) interventions relativizing the misinformation threat.Findings suggest that efforts like warning about the threat of misinformation can prime general distrust in authentic news, hinting toward a deception bias in the context of fear of misinformation being salient.Next, the successfulness of NML interventions is not straight forward if it comes to avoiding that the salience of misinformation distorts people's creditability accuracy.We conclude that the threats of the misinformation order may not just be remedied by fighting false information, but also by reestablishing trust in legitimate news.
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“emphasizing the harms of deepfakes may cause declining trust in all information, including true content (also see Van der Meer et al., 2023).”
From How persuasive are political cheapfakes disseminated via social media? The effects of out-of-context visual disinformation on message credibility and issue agreement (2025) · cites this paper as Van der Meer et al., 2023
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Metadata
- Authors
- van der Meer, T. G. L. A., Hameleers, M., & Ohme, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Amsterdam (NL)
- Weizenbaum Institute (DE)
- Corresponding author
- van der Meer, Toni G. L. A.
- Venue
- Journalism Studies
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2023-03-16
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 803-823
- ISSN
- 1461-670X (ISSN-L)
- 1469-9699
- OpenAlex
- W4327555979
- Cited by
- 121
- References
- 70
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 43 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 13
- FWCI
- 51.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journalism Studies (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Refubium (Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin Hochschulschriftenstelle u. Dokumentenserver (cc-by)
- Funders
- Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Communication and COVID-19 Impact
- Social Sciences › Communication › Journalism and Media Studies
- Keywords
- misinformation, news credibility, spillover effects, corrective information
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