Can We Immunize Against Misinformation? with Sumitra Badrinathan

Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies?

Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from corrections and warning-labels to educational programs designed to inoculate citizens against untruths. Yet most of what we know about misinformation and its antidotes comes from the US and other Western contexts – places with notably high rates of formal education and internet exposure, where most of the misinformation is on public platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But these are contexts that, to put it simply, don’t look like most of the world.

Our guest today – Dr. Sumitra Badrinathan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at American University’s School of International Service – turns our attention to India – the world’s largest democracy. As in much of the Global South, internet access in India is expanding in leaps and bounds, and misinformation travels more on encrypted chat services like WhatsApp than on Facebook. Over the last few years, Sumitra has been running innovative field experiments testing the effectiveness of misinformation antidotes tailored to the Indian context.

We talk with Sumitra about one of these studies, recently published in the American Political Science Review. As Sumitra explains to us, citizens in India were awash in misinformation during the crucial 2019 election battle, a dynamic exacerbated by increased partisanship in the era of Modi’s BJP and Hindu nationalism. Carried out during the election, Sumitra’s study examines whether Indian citizens can get better at telling truth from lies if you teach them how to do their own online fact-checking.

We find out whether the treatment actually worked – which turns out to be a complicated story. We also dig into Sumitra’s research process – how she was able to get 95% uptake from participants (spoiler: it involved lots of tea) and how she had to change parts of the study on the fly when bringing tablets into the field turned out to be unsafe. And we talk with Sumitra about how her own identity made some parts of the fieldwork more challenging, brought down some barriers, and most of all was something that she had to constantly be aware of as she navigated the complex terrain of running a field experiment.

By the way, this conversation is about just one of the many misinformation antidotes Sumitra has been investigating. If you want to learn about her work on the effects of religious messaging or of peer corrections in combating deception, check out the links to her other papers on the episode webpage.