Our goal in this paper was to examine how exposure to misinformation online during the 2020 election compared with exposure during the 2016 election. By adopting the analytical approach of Guess et al.6, who examined exposure to untrustworthy websites during the 2016 election, we assessed exposure to untrustworthy websites among a nationally representative sample during the 2020 election and compared it with 2016 exposure. We found this decrease despite using a database of untrustworthy sites over three times the size of the database used in Guess et al.6 to identify visits to untrustworthy websites in our participants’ web browsing behaviour, which increased our capacity to detect visits to untrustworthy websites. Our findings indicate a relatively across-the-board decline in exposure to untrustworthy websites from 2016 to 2020, but why does this decline occur? In this paper, we provide evidence that exposure to untrustworthy websites decreased from 2016 to 2020.

Source: New York Times April 13, 2023 15:57 UTC