Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

CJR will be off through the end of this week for Thanksgiving. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday.

Research on the effects of misinformation tends to focus on the big-picture stuff: voting patterns, elections, political systems. But the authors of The Patina of Distrust, a new book that explores how people interpret misinformation, argue that that perspective overlooks a crucial piece of the puzzle. Basing their findings on extensive research conducted in the wake of Argentina’s 2019 elections, they conclude that news consumers are less susceptible to falsehood than we might anticipate, despite filter bubbles and the internet’s power to supercharge rumors and lies. “In one of our experiments, we found that people assign more credibility to true news than false news, even when the misinformation aligned with their political beliefs,” Eugenia Mitchelstein, one of the book’s authors, told CJR. 

Mitchelstein, an associate professor at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, proposes that in societies like Argentina, where levels of institutional distrust are high, the population develops a “patina,” or buffer, that protects them from misinformation. This is useful in some contexts, less so in others. While the patina makes it harder to fall prey to falsities, it also stops people from believing the truth, eroding trust in the media. This can create problems for fact-checkers and journalists. As the US media landscape becomes more polarized, trust in institutions is eroding here too, Mitchelstein said. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

CAG: When did you start working on the project, and what were you thinking about at the time?

EM: In 2016, there were two momentous elections: there was Brexit, in Britain, and then in November, there was the first election of Donald Trump in the United States. At that point in time, a lot of people started talking about fake news as the driver of these two elections—in particular, the role Facebook had played in deploying fake news to voters in the UK and in the US through Cambridge Analytica. 

There were also lots of fact-checking initiatives and concerns about the role of misinformation in democracies. In 2018, I was in Latin America working on a different project with Pablo Boczkowski, one of the Patina of Distrust coauthors. Bolsonaro had just been elected in Brazil, and there were a lot of discussions about misinformation on Facebook and WhatsApp. WhatsApp is very commonly used in Brazil, and also in Argentina. Then, in 2019, Claire Wardle, who is a professor at Cornell University, asked Boczkowski if he wanted to do something on misinformation in Argentina, and he invited me to be part of the project.

I study political communication. I study news consumption. So I thought that was interesting. We got funding from Meta—which owns WhatsApp—to conduct survey experiments to see the extent to which people assigned credibility and veracity to misinformation, supposing they got it on Facebook or WhatsApp, or on the media, or from somebody else. Pablo, who is an expert in qualitative research, said that we should do interviews too. He had some funding from Northwestern University, and we started this research design with María Celeste Wagner, who is now at Rutgers, and Facundo Suenzo, who has just finished his PhD at Northwestern. 

We came up with this three-wave panel survey, which had experiments enmeshed in every wave. They measured credibility, veracity, perceptions that people will get angry if they receive misinformation or not. We asked people, “Do you think your friends, family, coworkers would get angry if you forwarded them this piece?” And we found that when the stimulus was disinformation, respondents anticipated higher levels of anger than when the stimulus was true news. We also did seventy interviews face to face with citizens in Argentina. At the time, we weren’t thinking about a book. But as we were reading the interview transcripts and analyzing them and the survey, we realized that this was fascinating.

What made you think that?

What surprised us was that people in the surveys—a representative sample of Argentinians—assigned much less credibility to misinformation than to real information, and we attribute this to the distrust they have in institutions and in information-producing institutions and elites, including journalists and news, which builds, as we say in the book, a patina of distrust. So people distrust almost everything they hear, and that’s why they also distrust misinformation. 

So people weren’t really believing the misinformation? 

Some people were believing it, but not to the extent that it created a change in elections. In most cases, research on misinformation is not looking at reception practices. It’s looking at the fact that there is misinformation and that it’s circulating. That’s interesting in and of itself, but we found that there’s a missing link. 

How would you describe this “patina” that you talk about in the book? 

Something that came up a lot in interviews was history, which we were not expecting. But that’s the beauty of in-depth interviews. 

There’s this assumption in the literature that misinformation is a recent phenomenon, that it has never happened before. It’s often attributed to technology and platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, or TikTok, or whatever. But in the interviews, people were saying that well, in Argentina, there’s always been fake news; that the government usually lies to the media and you can’t trust them. 

In the second wave of the survey, we included a question about trust and found that, with a few exceptions—teachers, professors, scientists—trust in institutions was very, very low. What we propose in the book is that this distrust over the years and these shared memories of misinformation—because some of these people were too young to have lived through the dictatorship—resulted in people building a protective capacity against misinformation, and we call this protection a patina of distrust. So it’s like the patina that protects works of art from the weather, but it protects Argentinians, which is the population we studied. This might be at work in other populations too. 

You mention that this barrier can also prevent people from believing news that is factually correct. What can journalists do to stop this from happening and build trust? 

This was something we discussed a lot because we didn’t want to write something pessimistic, so the first thing I’d say is that distrust is not that bad. We might want to keep some measure of distrust to keep people alert. The second thing is that a lot of initiatives—for instance, about media literacy—suppose that people know nothing. They assume that we have to teach people that the media has interests. People know that already. 

The third thing is that some initiatives say that we should do more to regulate the spread of misinformation, particularly through government action. But because these institutions are not trusted, more regulation won’t cut it. I think it’s better to work from the media literacy people already have instead of trying to impose the idea that people should trust some—usually mainstream—media.

Something that appeared a lot in the interviews was the idea that truth and falsity are not mutually exclusive. One interviewee said that everything that’s true has a bit of falsity in it, and that everything false has a little truth in it. So I think the idea that something is completely true or completely false goes against how people interpret the news. This ontological distinction between truth and falsity is a construct of fact-checking, but it’s not the way people interpret things.

How relevant are your findings to the media and information landscape in the US? 

In Argentina, the media system is very politicized. People go from being newspaper columnists to politicians, and vice versa. That’s rarer in the US, but what I’ve seen as an avid observer and news consumer is that media is getting more polarized there, and columnists and journalists and even news outlets are becoming more in favor or against politicians or political parties. And I think that might undermine people’s trust in the media.

The United States is a different country with different institutions and a different history, but what we might be seeing is this extension of mistrust in the media that might also lead to an extension of mistrust in misinformation. 

Most of the literature treats distrust as something negative, because you need trust to build a polity. But there’s a lesser-known but solid stream of research that says, “No, you need distrust to fight autocracy.”

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.