Lisa Farman, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication, presented her research at the 43rd annual conference of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR), held in Chicago, November 16-17. Dr. Farman's research paper was titled: Fake news, epistemic political efficacy, and the third-person effect. The abstract is included below:
"Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, citizens and lawmakers have expressed growing concern about the influence of fake news (news stories that are intentionally and verifiably false, often spread through social media) on today’s political landscape. This study examines the third-person effect for fake news, or people’s perception that fake news has a greater effect on others than themselves. It also applies two relevant constructs for the current online media landscape as antecedents of the third-person effect for fake news: epistemic political efficacy, or the belief that one is able to successfully find out the truth about political facts, and information seeking. Finally, it examines the behavioral component of the third-person effect for fake news. In an online survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=317), 85.2% of respondents said they had seen a fake news article online, and 23.4% said they had shared a fake news article. Information seeking was a significant mediator of the relationship between epistemic political efficacy and the third-person effect for fake news, even after controlling for trust in mainstream media, strength of partisanship, and demographic variables. Examining the behavioral component, the third-person effect had a negative relationship with support for government regulation, but positive relationships with support for regulation by social media sites and behavior modification by websites that create fake news. After controlling for demographics, trust in mainstream media, strength of partisanship, and paternalism, the effects remained for all behavioral outcomes."