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Motivated Reasoning Without Partisanship? Fake News in the 2018 Brazilian Elections

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Motivated Reasoning Without Partisanship? Fake News in the 2018 Brazilian Elections Motivated Reasoning Without Partisanship? Fake News in the 2018 Brazilian Elections Frederico Batista Pereira1, Natália S. Bueno2, Felipe Nunes3, and Nara Pavão4 1Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte 2Assistant Professor, Emory University 3Assistant Professor, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 4Assistant Professor, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Abstract Studies suggest that rumor acceptance is driven by motivated reasoning and that people’s desire to conclude what is suggested by their partisanship undermines the effectiveness of corrective information. This paper explores this process in a context where party attachments are weaker and less stable than elsewhere. We conducted a survey experiment during the 2018 elections in Brazil to examine the extent of rumor acceptance and the effectiveness of fact-checking corrections to fake news stories disseminated about the country’s most important political group. We find that about a third of our respondents believe the rumors used in the study and that, just like what is found in developed nations, belief in misinformation in Brazil is correlated with (anti)partisan attitudes. However, fact-checking corrections are particularly weak in Brazil compared to the developed world. While weak parti- sanship reduces the rates of rumor acceptance in Brazil, ineffective corrections are unlikely to prevent the circulation of fake news in the country. Please do not quote or cite without permission Fake news, understood as false information whose purpose is to generate and reinforce misperceptions of reality, is a growing concern in politics, due to its potential to distort public debate and disrupt elections (Lazer et al. 2018). The vast majority of the knowl- edge we currently have about political misperceptions comes from research conducted in the developed world, particularly in the United States (Walter and Murphy 2018; Nieminen and Rapeli 2019). This growing field shows that misinformation is pervasive, resilient, and largely fueled by partisanship (Nyhan and Reifler 2010; Flynn, Nyhan and Reifler 2017; Berinsky 2017b). Yet, despite growing scholarly interest in the dissemination of misinformation across the Global South, we have limited knowledge about the contours and dynamics that the spread of fake news about politics assumes in such settings. The recent epidemic of fake news in large democracies like Brazil, India, and Mexico has raised concerns regarding the particularly negative implications that this phenomenon may have in the developing world. At the same time, many developing democracies have low levels of partisanship (Dalton and Weldon 2007; Lupu 2015; Samuels and Zucco 2018). For years, many believed that fractured party systems and low levels of party identification loomed over developing democracies, making them unstable. However, with the rise of polarization and partisan- driven misinformation, shallow levels of party identification among the electorate may limit the spread of fake news. We examine the phenomenon of political misperceptions in the context of the 2018 elections in Brazil, which were particularly plagued by the dissemination of misinfor- mation (Resende, Melo, Sousa, Messias, Vasconcelos, Almeida and Benevenuto 2019; Machado et al. 2019). Brazil presents a different set of partisan attitudes and represents a novel setting to test and further develop old and new hypotheses regarding political misbeliefs and their persistence. The country has lower levels of party identification than most developed nations and a strong aversion to political parties, which has created a large contingent of self-identified nonpartisan voters. At the same time, the partisan attitudes that have indeed formed in Brazil are structured around the country’s main 2 political party—the Workers’ Party (PT) (Samuels 2006; Samuels and Zucco 2018). An important share of Brazilian voters cultivates either a psychological attachment to or a rejection of this political party (positive and negative partisanship, respectively). More- over, a growing number of studies show that many self-declared nonpartisans take sides and behave similarly to partisans during elections due to short-term electoral stimuli (Baker and Rennó 2019). In this paper, we examine how widespread beliefs in political fake news are in Brazil, as well as how resilient they are to third-party fact-checking corrections. We also explore the extent to which partisanship drives beliefs in political rumors and moderates the effectiveness of corrective information. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind in Latin America and one of the first in the developing world.1 As such, the study has the potential to improve our comparative understanding of the nature of beliefs in political fake news. Our design relies on the manipulation of existing fake news stories about the Workers’ Party and its main icon, former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, which represent the political group most targeted by the circulation of false information in Brazil. We conducted data collection using a face-to-face cross-sectional survey with an embedded experiment on a large representative sample of voters from the state of Minas Gerais—which has the country’s second-largest contingent of voters—just a few days before the first round of the national elections in 2018. We assess the prevalence of false beliefs about politics as well as the effectiveness of professional fact-checking corrections to six fake news stories that had large circulations in Brazil. We find that about a third of our sample accepts the rumors used in the study, and that rumor acceptance is correlated with partisan and antipartisan attitudes. Our results also show that fact-checking does not increase rumor rejection during the election, 1The study by (Carey et al. 2020) explores rumors about disease outbreaks in Brazil, which are treated by the literature as nonpolitical rumors. For other studies see the section Appendix K in Supporting Information (SI) for more details. 3 even among a large share of self-identified nonpartisan voters. We also show suggestive evidence that corrections may work among “true” nonpartisans, that is, a subset of self- declared nonpartisans who express neutral feelings toward the PT. Therefore, our contribution to the study of misbeliefs in politics is twofold. First, our findings suggest that the process of rumor acceptance operates similarly in less established democracies relative to more advanced ones, where most of the existing evidence has been produced. Second, this pattern suggests that although limited partisanship in Brazil may prevent higher levels of rumor acceptance among the public, fact-checking corrections are ineffective at debunking these rumors and preventing their dissemination The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Next, we review the main contri- butions of the literature regarding the determinants of political misinformation as well as the ineffectiveness of corrective information. This section also discusses the configuration of partisan attitudes in Brazil and presents the main hypotheses tested. In the following section, we describe the study design and the variables used in the empirical analysis. The results are divided into two parts. The first presents the findings regarding the deter- minants of beliefs in false information in Brazil, and the second analyzes the effectiveness of corrective information as well as its correlates. Then we put our findings from Brazil in perspective by providing a meta-analysis of political science studies on fake news and discuss how features of our design do not explain the differences we find. The conclusion of the paper discusses the implications of our results for the study of misinformation and politics more broadly. The Prevalence and Persistence of False Beliefs Fake news is false information— that is., “distorted signals uncorrelated with the truth” (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017, 212)—whose main purpose is to generate and re- inforce misperceptions of reality. Although fake news stories closely follow the shape and form of traditional news media content, they are not produced following the same standard rules and procedures that render accuracy and credibility to information (Lazer 4 et al. 2018). When manifested in politics, fake news assumes two main features: it is both false and politically motivated. Fake news represents a growing concern for political science. Although empirical evi- dence documenting its effects is still scarce, fake news is often associated with undesirable political outcomes. By promoting misinformation, fake news is thought to make voters “less informed about the costs and benefits of proposed policies and the performance of politicians in office” (Little 2018, 49), which could distort public debate and have dis- ruptive implications for democracy. Although the evidence is mixed, there is a growing concern that the dissemination of fake news may be tied to political polarization and generalized distrust (Tucker et al. 2018). Finally, despite existing evidence showing po- litical campaigns to have limited capacity to persuade voters, the endorsement of fake news pieces in social media may boost their effects on vote choice (Lazer et al. 2018). As a result of the potential negative effects of this phenomenon, considerable academic effort has been made to understand the factors that lead citizens to hold false beliefs about politics and also what can correct these beliefs. Although individuals’ political sophistication (Fridkin, Kenney
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