Experimental Study on the Impact of Media Education to Mitigate Misinformation Among Peruvian University Students

This project aims to measure the effectiveness of an educational intervention designed to mitigate misinformation among Peruvian university students. Misinformation is a social problem that gains significance in electoral contexts and affects citizens' decision-making power and deliberative quality, creating dynamics of reality and truth distortion, undermining the legitimacy of actors and trust in institutions, and exacerbating polarization. In response, there is a consensus in the scientific literature on the importance of promoting media literacy as a way to mitigate this problem. However, there is little evidence of its effects in real terms. This mixed-methods research seeks to measure the short- and medium-term impact of an educational intervention to address misinformation among university students in two regions of the country (N=372), as well as propose improvements and suggestions for future interventions.

Although misinformation is not a new topic, there is renewed interest in understanding the causes and consequences of so-called informational disorders (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), particularly marked in the Global North and intensified in electoral political contexts (such as Trump’s election in the USA or Brexit in the UK) (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Chaves & Braga, 2019; Gutiérrez et al., 2021). It is, therefore, an issue that affects the quality of democracy, especially when organized for that purpose.

It is an inevitable phenomenon in the digital context due to the ease of disinformative dynamics (Wittenberg & Berinsky, 2020). Even more so with the entry of "new" non-human actors, such as platforms (known as "super spreaders" of misinformation), Artificial Intelligence, and algorithms that facilitate hyper-segmentation to reach specific users (UNESCO, 2023).

Popular explanations for why people believe and share false information include ideological biases, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and lack of trust in institutions (Altay et al., 2023). Other users are more aware of the reputational costs of spreading fake news, which constitutes a relevant barrier to doing so (Altay et al., 2022).

While there is no real consensus on the massive impact of the problem, there is evidence that not all population groups are equally vulnerable. For example, populations with lower educational levels are more likely to believe in hoaxes and fake news (Badrinathan, 2021), as well as the case of older adults (Sádaba et al., 2023; Vargas-Bianchi et al., 2023).

Recent studies (Boman & Schneider, 2021; Basol et al., 2021; Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021) demonstrate that interventions to equip citizens with media skills (known as prebunking) can be used to limit the effects of misinformation. However, there is still little empirical evidence on the effects of media literacy interventions to attenuate or mitigate misinformation (Guan et al., 2021), especially in Latin America. Very few studies evaluate the behavior of misinformation victims (Murphy et al., 2023), and few publications that seek measures against misinformation do so with real-world data (IPIE, 2023).

In Ibero-America, there is a growing scientific interest in addressing this phenomenon, but with an overabundance of studies on social networks (at the expense of traditional media), the impact of fact-checking as a strategy, and case studies focused on far-right parties and leaders (López-López et al., 2023). The democratic instability of the regions of the Global South, linked to economic crises and the precariousness of democratic institutions, has promoted the discourse of misinformation as a pressing problem deserving a more significant place on the public and academic agenda (Ipsos-UNESCO, 2023).

In this vein, we aim to investigate the impact of an educational intervention to mitigate misinformation, measured quasi-experimentally, which will help fill a gap in the scientific literature (Guan et al., 2021; Guess et al., 2020).