Recently there have been a lot of concern about spread of online misinformation. Reassuringly, most Americans are able to discern true news stories from fake ones.
The typical true news story is selected by over 70% of our respondents. By contrast, the typical fake news story is selected by fewer than 25% of respondents.
Our methodology allows us to exploit these raw figures to estimate survey respondents’ confidence when completing the quizzes. We find that:
- About 60% of surveys respondents are very confident about the most important news story of the month being true. This figure falls to 44% and 31% when looking at the second and third most important stories of the month.
- By contrast, most fake news are believed to be true by fewer than 10% of respondents. No fake news is believed to be true by more than 20% of survey respondents.
Americans are just as well-informed about national politics than sports or entertainment. Survey respondents perform equally well in quizzes about national politics and quizzes about sports and entertainment.
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