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Americans Believe Russian Disinformation ‘To Alarming Degree’
(www.forbes.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.
If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."
So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.
[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]
One easy trick that makes you immune to propaganda - simply respond "not sure" to every question you're ever asked. It doesn't really even save you though because they'll just lump you in with the people who chose the wrong answer. The site repeatedly uses the phrase, "failed to identify as false" to group the "not sures" in with the incorrect responses.
There's an almost endless way to present poll numbers and survey results to support whatever conclusion you like, you could say that "fewer than half the respondents were able to identify this claim as false," or you could say, "80% of respondents avoided incorrectly labeling this claim as true," depending on what narrative you prefer. And that's assuming that the raw data itself, which comes from an internet survey, is reliable and representative.