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

In May 2018, hundreds of websites located outside the European Union (EU), including USAToday.com, became completely or partially unavailable to EU citizens as a number of publishers decided to comply with an EU data protection regulation (GDPR) by blocking access. Several of the sites that started to exclude EU users continued to do so for months or years, even though some of their competitors, like the New York Times, never adopted a policy of exclusion. These differing strategies allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects of temporary product unavailability and temporary rationing. We find that both temporary product withdrawal and temporary rationing can have long-term effects. In our case, monthly unique visitors in the months and even years after full access was restored were between 44% and 61% lower than they had been before the restrictions were imposed, with a wider market contraction explaining only part of these falls. We also find distinct differences between the effects of temporarily rationing and temporarily withdrawing websites. Although both strategies lead to a long-term loss in visitors, rationing appears to increase a website's desirability for some consumers. After rationing was lifted, USAToday.com's reduced audience consumed the title more deeply and frequently than had been the case before rationing was imposed.

The watchdog role has been one of the most widely discussed normative functions of the press. In this study, we examine the public’s attitudes toward the news media’s watchdog performance and how they correlate with trust in news and news avoidance, two important phenomena for democracy and the health of the public sphere. We further examine how individual predispositions (e.g. political interest, ideology) and contextual variables (e.g. press freedom) moderate these relationships. Based on data from the 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that across 38 countries, watchdog performance evaluations are positively associated with trust in news but that they are also positively associated with higher levels of news avoidance. Last, we find that evaluations of media in other functions like helping citizens understand the most important topics of the day and choosing relevant topics were more strongly associated to trust in news and lower news avoidance levels than watchdog performance evaluations.

Does the news media exacerbate or reduce misinformation problems? Although some news media deliberately try to counter misinformation, it has been suggested that they might also inadvertently, and sometimes purposefully, amplify it. We conducted a two-wave panel survey in Brazil, India, and the UK (N = 4732) to investigate the effect of news and digital platform use, on awareness of and belief in COVID-19 misinformation over time. We found little support for the idea that the news exacerbates misinformation problems. News use broadened people’s awareness of false claims, but did not increase the likelihood that people would believe them—and in some cases, news use actually weakened false belief acquisition, depending on access mode (online or offline) and outlet type. In line with previous research, we also find that news use strengthens political knowledge gain over time, again depending on outlets used. The effect of digital platforms was inconsistent across countries, and in most cases not significant—though some, like Twitter, were associated with positive outcomes while a few others were associated with negative outcomes. Overall, our findings challenge the notion that news media, by reporting on false and misleading claims, ultimately leave the public more misinformed, and support the idea that news helps people become more informed and, in some cases, more resilient to misinformation.

Concern over online news echo chambers has been a consistent theme in recent debates on how people get news and information. Yet, we lack a basic descriptive understanding of how many people occupy bounded online news spaces in different countries. Using online survey data from seven countries we find that (i) politically partisan left-right online news echo chambers are real, but only a minority of approximately 5% of internet news users inhabit them, (ii) in every country covered, more people consume no online news at all than occupy partisan online echo chambers, and (iii) except for the US, decisions over the inclusion or exclusion of particular news outlets make little difference to echo chamber estimates. Differences within and between media systems mean we should be very cautious about direct comparisons between different echo chambers, but underlying patterns of audience overlap, and the continued popularity of mainstream outlets, often preclude the formation of large partisan echo chambers.

There is still much to learn about how the rise of new, ‘distributed’, forms of news access through search engines, social media and aggregators are shaping people’s news use. We analyse passive web tracking data from the United Kingdom to make a comparison between direct access (primarily determined by self-selection) and distributed access (determined by a combination of self-selection and algorithmic selection). We find that (1) people who use search engines, social media and aggregators for news have more diverse news repertoires. However, (2) social media, search engine and aggregator news use is also associated with repertoires where more partisan outlets feature more prominently. The findings add to the growing evidence challenging the existence of filter bubbles, and highlight alternative ways of characterizing people’s online news use.

In this chapter, Richard Fletcher examines some of the key findings from the 2018 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. This report analysed online data dealing with news consumption from approximately 74,000 respondents internationally, with particular focus on their “level of concern over and exposure to specific types of misinformation and disinformation associated with the news”. One of its main findings was that just over half of the respondents were either “very” or “extremely” concerned about bias, poor journalism, and completely made-up news. However, Fletcher explains that the level and areas of concern varies from country to country. For example, in Eastern Europe, the questionnaire showed that “misleading advertising was more of a concern than in many other parts of the world”. Fletcher analyses each key finding of the report, including the public perception of “fake news” as a term, and who news audiences think should do more to fix problems associated with misinformation. He concludes by emphasising the importance of monitoring public concern over misinformation, in order to properly address the problems it poses.

In this Reuters Institute report, we look at three key lessons learned on communications in the coronavirus crisis and look to the months ahead. We focus on communications because communication is central to any crisis, including a public health crisis, and is central to the political discussion around how we, as a society, handle them. Information from a wide range of sources, as well as people’s perception of the trustworthiness of these sources, will influence how they understand and respond to the crisis, and how they evaluate which institutions are helping address it (and which ones not). As researchers have long known, it is perceptions of risk, not actual risk, that determine how people respond to crises (Glik 2007), and these perceptions are influenced in large part by information from news organisations, sometimes by misinformation and disinformation, and by many other sources going well beyond official communication by governments and public health authorities. This is why, as WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in February, with the arrival and spread of COVID-19, ‘we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic’, a deluge of information, some of which is misinformation, political propaganda, rumours, or other forms of unreliable material.2From a public health perspective, the UK may face the second wave in some ways better equipped to deal with the epidemic. But the erosion in trust in key institutions we saw in the spring and summer means it is less well equipped to deal with the coronavirus communications crisis. Doing so effectively with waning attention and trust will require learning from the spring and summer and special emphasis on engaging those most at risk. To help with that, we offer three lessons identified on the basis of our work on the UK COVID-19 news and information project, where we have worked to analyse the role of news and media in the crisis over the last six months.

Social Media and Democracy - edited by Nathaniel Persily September 2020

In this Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford report, we examine information inequality and other social differences in how people have navigated the coronavirus communications crisis in the UK based on data from a series of surveys fielded fortnightly since mid-April. Our research was conducted as COVID-19 rippled through the UK with hundreds of thousands infected and tens of thousands of fatalities, creating severe and often very unequal social and economic impacts from both the disease and responses to it, and increasingly intense public discussion around the UK government’s handling of the crisis.