Brief and Effective: Media Literacy Tips Improve Fake News Discernment

Abstract We experimentally evaluate the effect of media literacy tips intervention on discernment of COVID-19 and Russo-Ukrainian war fake news, utilizing a sample representative of general adult population from a highly polarized Slovak republic. In addition, we test the relative power of the intervention against cognitive virtues and already-held beliefs, while controlling for trust in established and alternative news sources. We find that media literacy tips significantly improve discernment by lowering the perceived trustworthiness of fake news. Individuals with higher analytic thinking, scientific reasoning, intellectual humility, and epistemic curiosity, and those who trust established media discern fake from real news better, while those who trust alternative media and those who possess more COVID-19 and pro-Kremlin disinformation beliefs, discern worse. Importantly, the positive effect of media literacy tips intervention remains significant even after controlling for cognitive virtues, already-held beliefs, and trust in news sources.