Think the media’s biased against you? You probably think misinformation is too

Ever feel like the news media is out to get you? That it skews its stories to make your side look bad?

Okay — now what about the “fake news” media? All the misinformation out there online: Is it more unfair to your side of most arguments or the other one?

Decades of communications research has found that, all else equal, people do tend to think that the news media is rooting against people like them. It’s a phenomenon known as the hostile media effect, and we know that the more politically committed someone is to a party or ideology, the more likely they are to see the news media as biased against them. (Want to know why trust in news has decreased as American politics have gotten more partisan and tribal? There’s a big part of your answer.)

But does that same phenomenon also apply to online misinformation? That’s the subject of a new paper just published in the journal Political Communication. It’s titled “The Hostile Misinformation Effect: How Ideological Congruence Drives the Assessment of Misinformation Targets,” and its authors are Patrick van Erkel, Michael Hameleers, Aqsa Farooq, Katjana Gattermann, Marina Tulin, Elske van den Hoogen, and Claes de Vreese, most of whom are attached to the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. Here’s the abstract:

Misinformation is increasingly seen as a key challenge to democratic societies. Our study is one of the first to shed light onto the citizen perspective when it comes to the perceived target of misinformation during election campaigns. In doing so, we extend on a classic concept in the (political) communication literature, the hostile media effect, and examine whether this applies to misinformation as well, a so-called hostile misinformation effect. Do citizens believe that their political in-group is being targeted more by misinformation than their political out-group? Our argument is based on motivated reasoning and social identity theory and extends to the role of several crucial moderating factors.

Using data from a panel study conducted during the 2024 European Parliament elections across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland (N = 4,045), we find clear support for a hostile misinformation effect, as citizens believe their own political party was much more targeted than the political opponent. Moreover, we demonstrate that particularly political interest, party identity strength, ideological extremity, and being right-wing make people more susceptible to the phenomenon. Our findings demonstrate that the hostile media effect can be extended to the domain of misinformation perceptions. Moreover, they explain why people perceive to be surrounded by misinformation, and help contextualize literature suggesting that people associate misinformation with various other information disorders and threats.

To understand what van Erkel et al. are arguing, let’s step back and understand the original hostile media effect. The original paper (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper) gathered a group of 144 Stanford students, many of them drawn from pro-Israel and pro-Arab groups on campus. Researchers asked them a set of questions to record their views on the situation in the Middle East and their familiarity with recent events there. They then showed them six segments from the national evening newscasts (ABC, NBC, CBS) about the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which thousands of Arab civilians in Beirut-area refugee camps were killed by a militia backed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Everyone saw the same six segments, which added up to about 36 minutes. Then they were all asked to evaluate the stories for any bias. Pro-Israeli students strongly believed that the news stories were biased against Israel. And pro-Arab students strongly believed that the stories were biased against the Palestinians and other Arabs. These were, again, the same stories.

Pro-Arab subjects saw the news programs as “applying lower standards to Israel” than to other countries (i.e., “excusing Israel when they would have blamed some other country”). They also felt that the news programs “did not focus enough on Israel’s role in the massacre [in relation] to the role of other parties.” Finally, they believed that in light of all the potential positive and potential negative information that could have been used, the editors of the news programs succeeded in making a stronger positive case for Israel than a negative case against Israel.

Pro-Israeli subjects, in contrast, saw the news programs as “applying higher standards to Israel” (i.e., “blaming Israel when they would have excused some other country”), felt that the news programs “focused too much on Israel’s role in the massacre [in relation] to the role of other parties,” and believed that in light of the potential information available on both sides of the issue, the editors of the news programs had succeeded in making a stronger negative case against Israel than a positive case for Israel.

Subjects on both sides also concluded, after watching, “that the ‘personal views’ of the editorial staffs of the news programs were opposite to their own.”

Interestingly, the study made an unusual finding about people with high levels of knowledge — news junkies, you might think of them. Remember, the students had all been asked questions to test their knowledge of the conflict. The people who’d done well on those questions, who knew the most about the conflict? Their ideology drove how their knowledge interacted with their opinions on bias. High-knowledge pro-Israelis were more likely to think the news stories were anti-Israel. High-knowledge pro-Arabs were more likely to think the stories were anti-Arab. But high-knowledge subjects who didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other were less likely to see bias.

In other words, for partisans, more knowledge made people see more bias in the news. But for neutrals, more knowledge made people see less bias.

Further research has found other factors that contribute to increased perceptions of media bias: higher levels of interest in politics, more extreme views, right-wing ideology, increased hostility toward political opponents, distrust of institutions, and a number of psychological traits like need for closure.

It’s into that body of research that van Erkel et al. stride, asking whether or not the same phenomenon applies for misinformation.

Researchers surveyed about 4,000 people in Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European parliamentary elections — both before and after the elections themselves. People were asked to identify which political party they would vote for, as well as which party they would “absolutely not vote for.” European electoral systems are, of course, filled with many more major parties than the American one, so they were able to tease out a less-binary set of data than pro-Israeli/pro-Arab, or pro-Democrat/pro-Republican.

Later, the subjects were asked to think about online misinformation surrounding the election — not necessarily misinformation they themselves had seen, but their impressions of the current universe of political misinformation at that time. They were asked, on a 1-to-7 scale, the degree to which they had “the impression that misinformation particularly targets” both their favored party and their least favorite party.

Van Erkel et al. didn’t expose them all to a common corpus of media, the way the original hostile media effect researchers did. They weren’t reacting to specific Facebook memes or TikTok videos. Those 1982 TV clips gave partisans something concrete to react to, while this open-ended conception of “misinformation” gave subjects space to apply their own notions of what the media universe looks like.

(It would be interesting, though, to ask people more specifically about misinformation they had seen. On one hand, partisans are less likely to consider a particular item as “misinformation” if it favors their party — they’re more likely to consider it good information. But on the other, social media algorithms are very good at shoveling that sort of politically congruent misinformation at people — think of your uncle’s Facebook feed.)

So what did the researchers find? As with the news media, people tend to believe that misinformation disproportionately targets their side: 49.6% said their preferred party was at least somewhat “particularly targeted” by misinformation, versus only 21.5% who said that it wasn’t. When asked about their least-favorite party, the numbers flipped: 27.3% said that party was at least somewhat particularly targeted, while 43.8% said it wasn’t. The effect was similar across all three countries — though in the Netherlands, it was less strong once the election date had passed.

Nothing too unexpected there. But how would specific factors play out? People with higher levels of political interest were more likely to see their own party as targeted. Same with people who were more attached to their political party or whose ideology was more extreme.

But there was — as in other bias-perception research — a significant difference on the left versus the right.

When comparing citizens on the political left with those on the right…we find that the hostile misinformation effect is significantly more pronounced for citizens that are more right-wing…Overall the hostile misinformation effect is 1.3 points stronger [on a seven-point scale] for those fully on the right compared to those fully on the left, holding all other variables constant….although the effect is present across the whole political spectrum, it becomes more pronounced as citizens become more right-wing.

Researchers also wanted to test if people’s perceptions of hostile misinformation were different after the election, depending on whether or not their preferred party had won or lost. The results didn’t find any statistically significant impact — but surprisingly, it was people whose party had won who seemed to view their party as particularly targeted, not the losers.

Our argument is based on motivated reasoning and social identity theory and extends to the role of several crucial moderating factors. We argue that, alongside a direct effect, the hostile misinformation effect is moderated by the extent to which voters are interested in politics, partisan identity, ideologically extreme positions, and electoral performance of the in-party…

Building on the concept of the hostile media effect, our findings suggest that similar underlying assumptions apply to voters’ assessments of misinformation targets: they are more likely to consider their own political party as victim of misinformation campaigns than opposing parties. This finding that perceptions of bias extend beyond (traditional) media coverage to perceptions of bias in misinformation campaigns is particularly relevant in the context of a new media ecosystem where there is potentially more misinformation abound, and a polarized political context where people are more inclined to process information with party considerations in mind.

If you think back to November 2016, you may remember a spree of stories attributing Donald Trump’s surprise victory, at least in part, to “fake news” — misinformation spread on Facebook, mostly. (I may have contributed to that spree.) But as a term, “fake news” became useless almost immediately as Trump made it his preferred term for news stories that were critical of him. “Fake news” is, in a polarized political environment, in the eye of the beholder. But no matter the reality, this study confirms that people’s perceptions of misinformation are driven by the same sorts of emotional identities and motivated reasoning that shape how they view the mainstream media.