So many ways these results are of minimal value. Q's like "Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality" will be a random guess, as are some of other true headlines. Many require some knowledge of the topic.
What those results actually show is, Republicans more likely to have lost their trust and confidence in their government, the media, etc. and more likely to believe government entities, as well as media, pharma, etc are not acting in the best interest of US citizens, and it's hard to blame them for coming to that conclusion. That is, Repubs more likley to believe the government is regularly doing nefarious things, so more likley to believe a negative headline about the topic.
Having said all that, they did a better job of examining the issue than I expected, but as you would expect, left/Dems using it to claim negatives about GOP voters. Regardless, there are some interesting findings, how those findings are interpreted is the key:
"Many Americans believe that they are regularly being exposed to misinformation online, and most are confident in their ability to distinguish real news from fake news.
However, Americans' confidence in their ability to spot fake news isn't always grounded in reality. A YouGov survey of 1,516 U.S. adult citizens tested Americans' susceptibility to falsehoods in news, and found that on average, they failed to correctly classify one-third of headlines as either real or fake. And certain segments of the population are even more likely to be fooled by misinformation. In particular, the poll finds that there are certain subgroups who are more likely than others to fail to distinguish fake headlines from real ones: Younger adults perform worse than older adults, Republicans perform worse than Democrats, and people who get their news from social media perform worse than people who do not.
How susceptible Americans are to misinformation overall
To determine how susceptible Americans are to misinformation, YouGov showed U.S. adult citizens a set of 20 headlines — 10 of which were real and 10 of which were fake headlines — in a randomized order. The survey participants were asked whether they believed each headline was real or fake. This survey design comes from the Misinformation Susceptibility Test, a framework developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge.
The fake news headlines, which were created with the assistance of artificial intelligence, were designed by the Cambridge researchers to encompass a wide range of misinformation properties — such as a person's tendency to accept statements that are meaningless or false and their belief in conspiracy theories. To select the real news headlines, the researchers used the Media Bias Fact Check database to identify news sources marked as the least biased while scoring very high on factual reporting. For both the real and fake sets of headlines, the researchers used several methods to narrow more than 400 potential headlines down to 20. That process yielded five real headlines from the Pew Research Center, three from Gallup, and one each from the Associated Press and Reuters.
Overall, Americans correctly classify a headline about two-thirds of the time. The average number of correctly classified headlines is 13 out of 20, with similar accuracy overall for the real and fake headlines; the average for each set is about 7 out of 10. (This article refers to the weighted mean number of correctly identified headlines as the average; the mean and median scores are the same for Americans overall.)
The headline that Americans are most likely to correctly identify as real is from a Pew Research story: "Republicans Divided in Views of Trump’s Conduct, Democrats Are Broadly Critical." Four in five Americans (80%) correctly identify that as a real headline, with Democrats (78%) and Republicans (83%) being similarly likely to answer correctly. Majorities of adults under 45 (70%) and Americans 45 and older (88%) identify it as real."
Cont: https://today.yougov.com/topics/poli...-headline-poll
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Originally Posted by ChattanoogaPhil
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