Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable
U.S. adults in this group are less likely to get the facts right about COVID-19 and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims.
U.S. adults in this group are less likely to get the facts right about COVID-19 and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims.
Most Americans (71%) have heard of a conspiracy theory that alleges that powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.
After three months of news and information, 64% of U.S. adults say the CDC mostly gets the facts about the outbreak right; 30% say the same about President Trump and his administration.
Americans’ confidence in checking COVID-19 information aligns closely with their confidence in checking the accuracy of news stories broadly.
Amy Mitchell (Pew Research Center), Philip Howard (University of Oxford), Jane Lytvynenko (Buzzfeed News) and Lori Robertson (Factcheck.org) discuss misinformation during the coronavirus outbreak, and ahead of the 2020 presidential election, as part of SXSW 2020's virtual sessions.
61% give equal attention to national and local coronavirus news.
A new analysis of open-ended responses to a survey of U.S. adults looks at the specific storylines or claims about COVID-19 that Americans said they were exposed to.
Responses to cable news coverage and the pandemic vary notably among Americans who identify Fox News, MSNBC or CNN as their main source of political news.
Despite the spread of the conspiracy theories, about three-quarters of U.S. adults say they have heard or read nothing at all about them.
More than half of these social media news consumers say they have encountered made-up news about COVID-19.