Fake News: Susceptibility, Awareness and Solutions

Résumé

This paper quantifies the impact of a demand-side policy intervention on citizens’ willingness to pay for protection against misinformation. We find that individuals generally lack proficiency in identifying fake news and overestimate their ability to distinguish between accurate and false content. Providing information-through-experience about personal susceptibility to fake news leads to belief updating and greater awareness of detection ability. Crucially, this increased awareness significantly raises individuals’ willingness to pay for measures that protect against the harms of misinformation.

Mots-clés

Fake news; misinformation; personal susceptibility; experience; belief updating; willingness to pay; demand-side policy intervention; RCT experiments;