The Alternative Truth Kept Hidden From Us: The Effects of Multimodal Disinformation Disseminated by Ordinary Citizens and Alternative Hyper-Partisan Media

The affordances of social media potentially amplify the effects of disinformation by offering the possibility to present deceptive content and sources in credible and native ways. We investigate the effects of two aspects related to the dissemination and modality of digital disinformation: (In)authentic references to the ordinary people as sources of disinformation and the multimodal embedding of deceptive content. Using a pre-registered experiment in the United States and India (N = 1008), we found that adding decontextualized visuals to disinformation on climate change did not amplify its effects on credibility or user engagement. Mimicking ordinary citizen cues has a stronger effect than using an alternative hyper-partisan media source to communicate disinformation under certain conditions. Low levels of media trust and preferences for information from the vox populi moderate the effects of citizen-initiated disinformation, suggesting that disenchanted citizens who oppose established information may be most vulnerable to disinformation attacks from social bots or trolls.社交媒体的可供性（affordances）可通过以可信且原生的方式呈现虚假内容与消息源的途径，潜在放大虚假信息的影响效应。本研究聚焦与数字虚假信息传播及呈现模态相关的两个维度展开效应分析：一是以普通民众作为虚假信息源的（非）真实指代，二是虚假内容的多模态嵌入形式。本研究在美国与印度开展预注册实验，有效样本量为1008（N=1008），结果发现：向气候变化相关虚假信息中添加脱离语境的视觉素材，并未对其可信度或用户参与度产生放大效应。在特定条件下，模拟普通民众的身份线索所产生的影响，要强于使用极端党派化媒体源传播虚假信息的效果。媒体信任度偏低、偏好民众来源信息的受众，会对公民发起的虚假信息的效应产生调节作用，这表明那些对既定官方信息抱有抵触情绪的幻灭民众，最易受到社交机器人或网络引战账号发起的虚假信息攻击的影响。