Agenda

17 Mar 2021 12:30

Lotte Swank - Vague news and fake news

Online seminar

Lotte Swank (University of Groningen)

Ca' Foscari-Groningen PhD seminar series

Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, some groups of people engaged in more social distancing than others. It has been shown that at least part of this difference can be attributed to different beliefs about the coronavirus' severity (Allcott et al., 2020), which partly originates from media exposure (Bursztyn et al., 2019). Aiming to explain the effects of biased information on citizens' decision making, I develop a theoretical model in which citizens' beliefs about their optimal personal decisions are based on the media's reports. The media notices their power on citizens' beliefs and decisions and slants information. I show that if citizens know that the media outlet is biased, slanting is of no avail and citizens' decisions are optimal. In contrast, if citizens are uncertain about the outlet's bias, citizens' decisions get affected without any additional information. As a reaction, citizens acquire additional information about the outlet's motives. I test the model's predictions using data about the COVID-19 outbreak where I measure citizens' information acquisitions on media outlets as their web searches on 'fake news'. I display positive evidence that the search term 'fake news' increases in popularity if the average measured emotions in news reports gets more variable. Moreover, in line with the model's predictions, I show that citizens only react to unexpected emotional changes. In contrast, if citizens expect the emotional variability in news reports, the popularity of the search term 'fake news' remains the same.

The seminar will held on zoom: https://unive.zoom.us/j/84361475658

ID riunione: 843 6147 5658

Lingua

L'evento si terrà in inglese

Organizzatore

Dipartimento di Economia (EcSeminars; CVera)

Link

https://www.rug.nl/staff/l.m.swank/

Cerca in agenda