| Popis: |
Considering the threat misinformation poses to democratic functioning, little research has studied how misinformation can influence beliefs about elections. We examine the effect of online misinformation exposure on a core democratic belief: the validity of elections. We study this relationship through a two-wave survey of 1,194 American adults and over 21M observations of these individuals’ web-browsing activities before and after the 2020 US Presidential Election. After flexibly adjusting for observed differences and propensity for selective exposure using double machine learning, we find that people exposed to misinformation websites were 4.2% more likely to falsely believe that the election results were fraudulent. We find strong evidence, however, of motivated reasoning: the effect rises to 12.6% among conservatives, but for liberals we observe no effect. There was also a dosage effect. For each exposure to a misinformation website, there was a .03% increase in the likelihood of holding this false belief. We discuss theimplications of these results in relation to broader concerns regarding the effect of misinformation on false beliefs related to democratic backsliding. |
