A presentation by Anna Kerkhof (ifo Center for Industrial Organization and New Technologies). This event is part of the Political Economy Lunch Seminar (PELS).
We conduct a randomised survey experiment to compare the short- and longer-term effects of fact-checking to a brief media literacy intervention. We show that the impact of fact-checking is limited to the corrected fake news, whereas media literacy helps to distinguish between false and correct information more generally, both immediately and two weeks after the intervention. A plausible mechanism is that media literacy enables participants to critically evaluate social media postings, while fact-checking fails to enhance their skills. Our results promote media literacy as an effective tool to
fight fake news, that is cheap, scalable, and easy to implement.
