Assessing the relationship between online information verification, overconfidence, and media literacy learning

To make informed decisions about a range of issues, people need to be able to determine if content they find online is trustworthy. To assess people’s ability to do this, we brought together findings from two nationally representative surveys of adult Australians. In the first survey (n = 3,852), we examined adult media use and asked respondents about their level of confidence in their ability to verify information online. The second survey then tested a subset of these participants (n = 2,115) to assess their ability to verify information online. The findings show that most adults have a low ability to identify misinformation online using information verification techniques, while many adults are overconfident in their ability. While all sociodemographic groups we examined expressed interest in further developing their media literacy, those who are overconfident are overall less interested in learning about common media literacy topics, while they also have distinct learning interests. These findings can be used to inform the design of adult media and information literacy initiatives that seek to increase people’s ability to identify misinformation.