Fake News: Overprecision and Detection

The paper discusses the results of a Horizon Europe Democrat project task focusing on fake news. The handling of fake news is based on an experimental design. The objective, using media analysis, is to study who believes and shares fake news, taking into account socio-economic and education background. It will explore how people learn to distinguish fake news, and how such characteristics differ between secondary education students and adults. We will do this by exploiting the variation of treatments and the set of news presented to subjects. This will allow us to causally isolate and quantify the effect of motivated memories on the ability of subjects to identify fake news from all potential confounds. The survey has been conducted online based on a representative sample. It includes inputs to evaluate the impact on fake news on the population in relation to the socio-economic and education background, but also inputs to calibrate the relevance of digital literacy for responsible democratic citizenship and to design the learning outcome assessment of the demonstration activities.