GEIS members Tiago Ventura and Raji Majumdar have published the paper Misinformation Beyond Traditional Feeds: Evidence from a WhatsApp Deactivation Experiment in Brazil in The Journal of Politics with co-authors Jonathan Nagler and Joshua A. Tucker from NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
In most advanced democracies, concerns about the spread of misinformation are typically associated with feed-based social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms also account for the vast majority of research on the topic. However, in most of the world, particularly in Global South countries, misinformation often reaches citizens through social media messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, we conducted a multimedia deactivation experiment to test the impact of reducing exposure to potential sources of misinformation on WhatsApp during the weeks leading up to the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. We find that this intervention significantly reduced participants’ recall of false rumors circulating widely during the election. However, consistent with theories of mass media minimal effects, a short-term change in the information environment did not lead to significant changes in belief accuracy, political polarization, or well-being.
Read the paper here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/737172?journalCode=jop.
The study offers novel insight into how private messaging platforms shape political information consumption and misinformation risk.
