In the survey, respondents were shown a random selection of six headlines — three true and three false — related to the election. Those six were drawn from a list of 11 headlines gathered largely from a BuzzFeed News analysis that compared the top-performing fake election news articles on Facebook to the the top-performing real election news articles on Facebook. Of the 11 headlines tested, five were false and six were true.
Respondents who said they recalled the story in question were then asked to rate the claim in the headline as “very accurate,” “somewhat accurate,” “not very accurate,” or “not at all accurate.”
Real news headlines received a higher overall accuracy rating than fake news. The respondents made 1,516 judgments about fake news headlines they’d recalled seeing or hearing about; 75% of the time, they thought those headlines were “somewhat” or “very” accurate. By comparison, they considered 83% of real news headlines to be accurate, based on 2,619 judgments.
Of the people surveyed, nearly 33% recalled seeing at least one of a selection of fake news headlines from the election. That compared to 57% of respondents who recalled seeing at least one of the real news headlines tested in the survey.
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