People in the United States seem to be an outlier in the amount of misinformation andconspiracy theoriesabout COVID-19 they share equate to four other English - speaking countries , harmonise to a young study . hoi polloi in Canada , the United Kingdom , Australia , and New Zealand were exposed to or so the same amount of misinformation online – but multitude in the US were three times as likely to portion out it .
There are also several differences in misinformation sharing between the US and other countries . An important one is about the ground to share conspiracy possibility . Outside the US , mass more often shared them to warn others that they were misinformation – unlike in the US , where they were mostly partake to boost or show musical accompaniment for them . They were also used as a way to connect to others .
" America is an outlier . Our findings are ordered with recent workplace about the outsize part that Americans play in sharing misinformation on societal media , " study writer and political scientific discipline professor Mark Pickup , from Simon Fraser University , said in astatement .
The findings come from representative internal survey conducted in the five countries first in July 2020 and then in January 2021 . The July analysis had 6,956 the great unwashed call for and the January follow - up has 5,864 , with about the same number of the great unwashed from each country represented .
In all land ( except Canada ) , those who trust societal medium to supply actual selective information are more likely to share misinformation than those who do n’t . Again , this phenomenon was more pronounced in the United States than in the UK , Australia , and New Zealand .
All five nation had something in common though : citizen who had populist posture and distrusted wellness functionary were most likely to divvy up misinformation online . The polarize political landscape where populist political leader engaged in culture wars over how to deal ( or not deal ) with the pandemic played a huge role , especially in the US . Those who identified as a conservative and those trusting the Trump government activity were more likely to share misinformation online .
“ Our determination are consistent with recent work about the oversized theatrical role that Americans wreak in sharing misinformation on societal media , ” the authors wrote inthe newspaper .
Facebook was by far the most rough-cut weapons platform for sharing misinformation – over half of those share misinformation or conspiracy theory used Zuckerberg ’s societal web to do so .
The study was published in theJournal of Quantitative Description : Digital Media .
