Opinion: Brazil does well in global misinformation ranking

By Wladimir Gramacho

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – There is no doubt that the circulation of misinformation is a serious problem in Brazil. With good reason, institutions and individuals have been concerned, for example, about containing the influence of false information on people’s decision to get vaccinated and the discussion about this year’s elections.

But a global study suggests that as serious as this problem is here, Brazilians seem to have a higher level of discernment than citizens of 15 other countries in the face of this misinformation.

Coordinated by two of the world’s leading researchers on misinformation – Gordon Pennycook (University of Regina, Canada) and David Rand (MIT, USA) – the study interviewed over 33,000 people in 16 countries on six continents during the first half of 2021.

The work aimed to describe the individual characteristics most associated with sharing misinformation and identify the most efficient strategies to tackle this problem.

Even though the study did not have the purpose of establishing a global ranking of individual skills in discerning misinformation, it revealed positive data about Brazil.

One of the tasks asked of the research participants was to indicate whether or not they would share several messages, among which there was some true and some false information.

The participants, however, did not know which messages were true and which were false.

The results show that Brazilians are less likely to share the false messages, followed by Italians, Mexicans, and Spaniards, who are also more cautious.

The worst performers in this task were registered by Australians, Americans, South Africans, and Indians, who would share almost in the same measure messages that were true and false messages.

Other results of the study are also very interesting. For example, in all the countries studied, some individual characteristics seem to be significantly associated with a greater ability to discern between false and true information.

These include people who enjoy intellectual challenges, cultivate democratic values, and believe that it is more important to pay attention to politicians’ arguments than simply follow what they recommend.

On the other hand, specific characteristics were associated with a lower ability to discern misinformation in many countries. Individuals who claim to belong to ethnic minorities, from low-income families, and who have a more conservative profile tend to have greater difficulty separating fake news from true news.

When investigating the strategies to face misinformation, the study showed that a simple invitation to some participants to classify a news item as true or false made them more judicious in sharing the news than the other participants who had not received the invitation.

This result has been repeated in several surveys and suggests that -from time to time- it is important to encourage people to reflect on the veracity of the content that circulates on the Internet.

With information from Poder360