Richard Fletcher’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015, but also that (b) there are different trends in different countries. More specifically, trust has declined more in media environments that have become less structured by television news use, and increasingly structured by social media news use. Our findings underscore how changing structures of media use may be central to explaining trust dynamics in recent years, which suggests new avenues for restoring trust where it has eroded.

Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened social divisiveness. This article investigates the impact of online partisan news consumption on voting behavior and social polarization during the 2022 elections in Brazil, a country where the public’s ties to political parties have historically been more limited or nonexistent but where ideologically aligned news content online has markedly increased in recent years. Drawing on a unique dataset linking behavioral web-tracking data of 2,200 internet users in Brazil and 4 survey waves with the same respondents, conducted before, during, and after the 2022 presidential elections, we find no significant relationship between the use of partisan media on either vote choice or social polarization overall; however, we do find some weak and inconsistent effects of trust in news moderating the impact of partisan media on social polarization.

Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and electoral institutions—sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors—is a challenge to public confidence in elections specifically and democracy more broadly. In this article, we analyze a combination of 42 million clicks in links and apps from behavioral tracking data of 2,200 internet users and a four-wave panel survey to investigate how different kinds of online news and media use relate to beliefs in electoral misinformation during a contentious political period—the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. We find that, controlling for other factors, using news from legacy news media is associated with belief in fewer claims of electoral misinformation over time. We find null or inconsistent effects for using digital-born news media and various digital platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp. Furthermore, we find that trust in news plays a significant role as a moderator. Belief in electoral misinformation, in turn, undermines trust in news. Overall, our findings document the important role of the news media as an institution in curbing electoral misinformation, even as they also underline the precarity of trust in news during contentious political periods.

Science has established the human-caused nature of climate change, yet the prevalence of climate-related misinformation persists, undermining public understanding and impeding collective action. Strikingly, existing research on belief in misinformation about climate change has disproportionately focused on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. To move beyond this, our online survey (N = 8541) includes high-income countries in North America (US), Western Europe (France, Germany, UK) and East Asia (Japan), as well as an upper-middle income country in South America (Brazil) and lower-middle income countries in South Asia (India and Pakistan). By examining the interplay of news media usage, information sources, and trust in these sources, we advance our understanding of how these factors influence belief in climate change-related misinformation in diverse socio-cultural contexts. Across countries, we found that the strongest determinants of belief in misinformation about climate change were identifying as right-wing (compared with left-wing), consuming less offline news, having less trust in scientists, environmental activists, as well as international organizations, and having more trust in politicians, celebrities, and energy companies. Overall, trust in sources of information about climate change and demographic variables were much stronger predictors of belief in misinformation about climate change than reported news consumption (online, offline or on social media). These findings suggest that trust is key to understanding belief in false information about climate change.

Digital media are often praised for having offered new ways to participate with news. But how has participation with news changed in recent years? A pre-registered analysis of survey data from 2015 to 2022 in 46 countries ( N = 577,859) shows that participation with news has declined. This decrease is observed in most countries and for most forms of participation, including liking, sharing, commenting on news on social media and talking about the news offline. The only form of participation that has increased is news sharing via private messaging apps. Overall, participation with news was higher among younger people, the university-educated, those with high interest in news and those with low trust in news. Over time, participation has declined more for those with lower trust in news, those without a bachelor’s degree and for women. Within countries, increases in political polarization were associated with lower participation.

Research shows the growth of online information has led to a decline in audience trust in mainstream news. However, how this lowered trust in the news affects different audiences’ attitudes and news consumption behaviour is less understood. Our thematic analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews with Australian heavy and non-news users of mainstream news shows that responses vary with respect to the effort taken to verify dubious news. Among heavy news users, responses include ‘pragmatic scepticism’, ‘selective trust’ and ‘generalised cynicism’ which tend to drive verification and fact-checking behaviours. These findings suggest that mistrust in mainstream news is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can lead to greater critical involvement with news and information. However, many non-news users depicted ‘critically conscious’ or ‘cynically disengaged’ attitudes towards news. A lack of trust can drive a low-effort response, particularly among non-news consumers, creating a downward spiral of disengagement.

Scholarship has increasingly sought solutions for reversing broad declines in levels of trust in news in many countries. Some have advocated for news organizations to adopt strategies around transparency or audience engagement, but there is limited evidence about whether such strategies are effective, especially in the context of news consumption on digital platforms where audiences may be particularly likely to encounter news from sources previously unknown to them. In this paper, we use a bottom-up approach to understand how people evaluate the trustworthiness of online news. We inductively analyze interviews and focus groups with 232 people in four countries (Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to understand how they judge the trustworthiness of news when unfamiliar with the source. Drawing on prior credibility research, we identify three general categories of cues that are central to heuristic evaluations of news trustworthiness online when brands are unfamiliar: content, social, and platform cues. These cues varied minimally across countries, although larger differences were observed by platform. We discuss implications of these findings for scholarship and trust-building efforts.