Populist radical-right attitudes, media trust, and social media reliance: Combining survey and tracking data to investigate predictors of online exposure to disinformation

Abstract

Despite the conceptual affinity of right-wing populism and disinformation, we know little about whether populist radical-right (PRR) attitudes impact exposure to disinformation online. Previous research indicates that individual characteristics and media use affect the likelihood of being exposed to (more) disinformation. However, few studies examined the effect of PRR attitudes on exposure to disinformation. Further, previous studies show limitations with regard to the measurement of actual online exposure to disinformation. For this study, we used a novel approach to understand how PRR attitudes, media trust and social media usage affect online exposure to disinformation in the beginning of the corona pandemic. We combined survey and tracking data on individual online information behavior of N = 594 participants from Germany. To identify disinformation in the tracking data, we developed a hybrid machine-human approach combining automated classification of disinformation with hand-coding. Findings show very low average online exposure to disinformation, but high concentration among a small group of individuals and websites. Higher levels of PRR attitudes, trust in non-traditional media, reliance on social media for political information, and lower levels of education predicted a higher online exposure to disinformation.