A study of 1,980 participants found that regardless of political ideology, laypeople trusted mainstream news sources more than hyper-partisan or fake news outlets, and layperson ratings of trust strongly correlated with ratings of professional fact-checkers; compared with Democrats, Republicans were less aligned with professional fact-checkers, due to lower trust in most mainstream news outlets, yet Republicans trusted left-leaning mainstream sites more than right-leaning hyper-partisan or fake news sites, according to the authors.
Article #18-06781: "Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality," by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.
MEDIA CONTACT: David G. Rand, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; email: rand.dave@gmail.com
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