News uses and effects on political knowledge and misbeliefs

The new online media ecosystem offers citizens unprecedented opportunities to acquire information and increase their knowledge about the political world. However, recent developments in cognitive and political psychology suggest that more information is not always socially better since knowledgeable people are more likely to hold misbeliefs. Thus, the question is if by increasing opportunities to acquire information the online media environment contributes also to expand misbeliefs. To tackle this question, this project focuses on how news uses in online communication ecosystems impact both political knowledge and misbeliefs, exploring the trade-offs as well between them. The project aims to advance understanding of these important issues by innovating in three key areas. First, it proposes to investigate these relationships by taking into account heterogenous effects across three relevant populations --the highly, moderately and low-informed. We expect individuals with different levels of political interest and information i.e., partisans, average citizens, and news avoiders to shape news uses and their effects differently. Second, the project is also aimed to overcome the current limitations and challenges on the measurement of news uses (or media diets) in the information-rich and increasingly complex online media environment. To do so, we rely on a four-wave web-tracking and survey panel study, aiming to study these relations dynamically. Digital trace data will allow to unobtrusively observe (and study) news uses in real-life situations, while survey data will allow to complement information on media uses and to collect information on the outcomes of interest. Finally, the project seeks to explore the role of context-level variables (news media fragmentation and polarization) in news uses, political knowledge and misbeliefs as an additional source of heterogeneity. Despite concerns that media fragmentation and polarization at the system level may affect knowledge and misbeliefs, few studies have systematically studied this source of variation. Moreover, no study that we know of has studied the role of contextual factors by exploiting naturally occurring variation in media fragmentation and polarisation at the sub-national, between-region level in Spain.