Striking the balance between fake and real: Under what conditions can media literacy messages that warn about misinformation maintain trust in accurate information?

Although interventions that warn about the harms of misinformation may be effective in lowering the credibility of false information, they may also cause suspicion related to factually accurate information. To explore these contradictory outcomes of exposure to media literacy messages, we used an online survey experiment with a diverse sample of 1105 participants in the U.S. In this experiment, we randomly exposed people to traditional warning messages about the threats of misinformation or relativising warning messages that placed misinformation’s threat in the context of the abundance of honest information. We additionally varied the specificity of the warning message (i.e. topic specific versus generic). We did not find direct overall effects on truth discernment but observed conditional effects on decreasing beliefs in misinformation and negative spillover effects on the truth rating of accurate information. We conclude that the effectiveness of media literacy interventions is far from straightforward, and document how pre-existing media trust plays a key role in the effects of such interventions. Based on our findings, we suggest that the effectiveness of specific and general media literacy messages may be contingent upon tailoring the message to levels of existing (dis)trust.