New Research Shows Voters Often Mistake True Information for Misinformation, Rarely Fact-Check During Elections
A new study from the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra has revealed a significant disconnect between what Australian voters believe is political misinformation and what professional fact-checkers verify as false. Conducted during the final week of Australia’s 2025 federal election campaign, the study used a digital diary method to track how ordinary citizens encounter, judge, and respond to dubious political content in real time. Over the seven days from April 26 to May 2, 2025, 38 participants from four marginal electorates submitted 254 examples of content they believed to be misinformation. The participants, recruited through YouGov, were drawn from the electorates of Deakin, Dickson, Gilmore, and Werriwa, and included people with varying news consumption habits. Each submission was later independently fact-checked by a professional journalist with more than a decade of experience in fact-checking for major news organizations. The findings paint a troubling picture: while participants were highly confident in their judgments, their perceptions often diverged sharply from objective verification. Only 10% of the submitted examples were confirmed as false by the fact checker, while 37% were actually true. A further 24% were misleading, 14% lacked evidence, 12% were missing context, and 6% were satire. The study’s authors argue that this gap suggests people’s assessments of misinformation are driven less by rigorous verification and more by their existing beliefs and partisan worldviews.
The most common reason participants gave for labelling content as misinformation was that it contradicted their existing knowledge or experience, accounting for 28% of all judgments. The second most frequent rationale, cited in 22% of cases, was a perception that the content was biased. Other reasons included insufficient evidence or lack of context (17%), emotional content such as fearmongering (13%), and claims that seemed implausible (13%). Strikingly, only 4% of judgments were based on external verification, such as checking authoritative sources or asking trusted people. Participants were asked to rate their certainty on a five-point scale, and the highest confidence levels were associated with judgments based on prior knowledge, with a mean certainty score of 3.89. Emotional responses and external verification also produced high certainty scores of 3.80 and 3.75 respectively. In contrast, judgments based on perceived bias had the lowest confidence level at 3.17. The researchers note that this pattern aligns with established cognitive biases, particularly the tendency to accept information that fits one’s existing beliefs and reject information that does not. They reference the “illusory truth effect,” whereby repeated exposure increases belief in both true and false information, and note that rejecting information as false requires additional cognitive effort. In a cluttered and overwhelming online information environment, people default to mental shortcuts that favour their prior attitudes, making them vulnerable to both misinformation and to dismissing legitimate factual reporting.
When participants encountered content they believed to be misinformation, their most common response was to do nothing, with 44% of reported encounters leading to no action at all. The second most common response was sharing or discussing the content with others, which occurred in 21% of cases. Only 17% of the examples prompted participants to search online for more information, and just 10% involved close scrutiny or re-reading without external verification. Other responses included dismissive emotional reactions (6%), ignoring or avoiding the content (4%), deleting messages (2%), and reporting content to platforms or group administrators (less than 1%). The authors highlight the large gap between doing nothing and the next most common action, suggesting that political misinformation may spread or persist without meaningful resistance in everyday settings. They also connect this passivity to information overload and political burnout, noting that previous research has found people often disengage when they find it difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood. The study’s authors argue that this disengagement has serious implications for civic discourse, because it allows political actors to make unverified claims during election campaigns without fear of being held to account by ordinary citizens. The low rate of fact-checking is particularly concerning, as it suggests that even when people possess the skills to verify information, they may lack the motivation or cognitive resources to apply them.
The gap between audience perception and professional fact-checking is illustrated by concrete examples from the study. In one case, a participant labelled a television advertisement as false and a scare tactic because it cited OECD figures showing a larger fall in disposable income in Australia compared to other OECD countries. The participant based this judgment on their existing belief that the Labor government had performed well economically. The fact checker, however, verified the advertisement’s claims as correct. In another example, a participant dismissed a news article with the headline “Coalition proposes ‘migrating’ public servants to regions in last-minute tweak to plan to slash workforce” as ridiculous and therefore false. The fact checker again confirmed that the article was accurate. These cases demonstrate that when information conflicts with a person’s political predispositions, it is more likely to be rejected regardless of its factual accuracy. The researchers also found that examples judged by participants as implausible, lacking sufficient evidence, or emotionally provocative were more likely to be verified as true by the fact checker, whereas only one item was confirmed false among cases where participants relied on external sources. This suggests that relying on gut feelings or ideological alignment is a poor substitute for verification, and that even well-intentioned citizens can become conduits for false accusations against legitimate news coverage.
The study also examined the sources and formats of the content participants perceived as misinformation. Nearly half of the examples, 47%, were encountered on social media platforms, with Facebook (19%) and Instagram (18%) being the most common sources. Traditional news media accounted for 19% of examples, including television (14%) and newspapers (5%). Online news websites and search platforms each contributed 9% and 6% respectively, while offline materials such as flyers and posters accounted for 9%. Political parties and politicians were the most frequently identified creators of the content, responsible for 49% of submissions, followed by mainstream news media at 18%. Social media influencers, activists, and alternative media were also cited as sources. In terms of narrative, 49% of the examples related to election policies, while 41% targeted specific candidates or parties. One-third of the examples were paid political advertisements, and only 2% were AI-generated content. This distribution suggests that during the election campaign, political advertising and partisan messaging dominated the information landscape, and that voters were more likely to encounter perceived misinformation through social media than through any other channel. The prominence of political parties as creators of disputed content underscores the broader concern about the lack of truth-in-political-advertising regulation in Australia, a gap that the authors argue should be addressed through national laws.
The implications of these findings are significant for democratic resilience and media policy. The authors argue that the combination of information overload, low levels of media literacy, and a lack of motivation to fact-check creates an environment in which misinformation can thrive. They point to research showing that fact-checking and debunking efforts have mixed results, and that prebunking or inoculation strategies may be more effective when applied before exposure. However, they emphasise that the most important need is broad media literacy education, particularly for adults who are no longer in formal education. A critical mindset, they argue, can help overcome belief perseverance bias, which causes people to cling to false information even after it has been corrected. They also highlight the importance of intellectual humility, defined as the ability to recognise the limits of one’s own knowledge and remain open to new information. This quality can help people become more aware of their own fallibility and more willing to verify dubious content. The study’s authors are careful to note the limitations of their research: it was conducted in only four marginal electorates, involved a small sample, and cannot be generalised to the Australian population. Misinformation also exists outside election periods, and the heightened intensity of campaign weeks may not capture all forms of misleading content. Nevertheless, the study offers a rare, real-world glimpse into how ordinary voters navigate a polluted information environment. Its central conclusion is sobering: citizens are not necessarily motivated to fact-check, their perceptions of misinformation are strongly coloured by partisan bias, and the result is a system in which false claims can circulate with impunity while accurate information is often dismissed.
