Is Misinformation Bad for Democracy?
The problem isn’t just believing false things.
Cleo: We usually talk about misinformation as though the danger is obvious: people believe something that isn’t true. But I wonder whether there’s another problem. Do people eventually reach the point where they feel they can’t work out what’s true at all?
Marshall: There does seem to be a problem with trust. But there’s also an interesting contradiction in how we consume news. Around 71% of UK adults use online sources for news and 51% use social media, even though traditional news providers tend to be rated more highly for trust, accuracy and impartiality.
Cleo: That sounds contradictory. If people trust traditional journalism more, why are so many of us getting news online?
I get quite a lot of my own news through social media. Not because I necessarily trust it more, but because it’s there. I’m already scrolling. And when politics is depressing, somebody making a joke about it can make it much easier to engage with.
If something interests me — or sounds a bit dubious — I’ll often Google it afterwards.
So perhaps social media isn’t always replacing journalism. Sometimes it’s just introducing us to a story.
Marshall: Exactly. Social media is incredibly frictionless. You don’t have to decide, I am now going to consume the news. News simply appears in between everything else in your feed.
Researchers sometimes describe this as background or indirect exposure. Instead of deliberately seeking out news, people encounter it while doing something else.
Cleo: Which is quite different from sitting down with a newspaper or deliberately switching on the ten o’clock news.
Marshall: It is. And the presentation is different too.
Particularly for younger audiences, news is competing with everything else online. Humour, short videos, personalities and cultural references can make complicated or depressing subjects easier to approach.
Social media can also offer things traditional journalism doesn’t always provide in the same way: immediate reactions, competing interpretations, comments from specialists or people directly affected, and a sense of what everyone else is talking about.
That can make it useful as a discovery mechanism, even for someone who would never regard TikTok, Instagram or Facebook as the final authority on whether something is true.
Cleo: But do people actually make that distinction? Or do we sometimes assume that anyone getting news through social media is simply believing whatever appears in front of them?
Marshall: Apparently many people do distinguish between discovering a story and verifying it. In a 2025 Reuters international survey, when people suspected that something might be false, 38% said they would check a trusted news organisation and 35% an official source. Only 14% said they would turn first to social media.
Cleo: Which makes the usual story — people have abandoned proper news for nonsense on social media — look a little too simple.
Maybe the more interesting question is why traditional journalism can still be something people trust, while not necessarily being where they want to encounter the news in the first place.
Marshall: That could be about more than trust. It could also be about format, accessibility, relevance and emotional experience.
A traditional article might require several minutes of concentration. A social-media explanation might take 45 seconds.
Traditional political coverage can also feel formal or remote. It can sometimes make public life seem like a conversation happening between politicians and journalists rather than something ordinary people are part of.
And breaking news often tells us what happened today without necessarily giving us enough of the longer story to understand why it matters.
Cleo: But is part of the problem simply that there’s too much news now?
It never really stops.
Marshall: Possibly. News used to arrive at particular points in the day. A morning newspaper. An evening bulletin. The ten o’clock news.
Now it follows us around.
There are rolling news channels, apps, push notifications, live blogs and social-media feeds updating continuously. Reuters Institute research has found that people who avoid the news often describe feeling bombarded by the volume of coverage, particularly negative political news.
Cleo: So maybe humour and short-form news aren’t just about people having shorter attention spans.
They might also be a way of making an overwhelming news environment a little more bearable.
Marshall: Exactly. But that creates another problem.
The same things that make information easier to consume — speed, simplicity, humour and emotional impact — can also make oversimplification and misinformation easier to spread.
And social media is participatory. People don’t simply receive a political message. They comment on it, argue about it, parody it, share it and sometimes transform it into something else entirely.
Cleo: Which brings us back to misinformation.
Maybe the danger isn’t simply that somebody sees a false claim and believes it.
Maybe it’s also that truth and falsehood become mixed together in such a constant stream that working out what to trust starts to feel like work.
Marshall: And once people feel that way, there’s another possible consequence: they may disengage.
Not necessarily because they’ve been persuaded by the misinformation, but because the whole information environment has become too exhausting or confusing to navigate.
Cleo: So perhaps we’re asking the wrong question.
Instead of continually asking:
Why are people getting their news from social media?
maybe mainstream journalism should occasionally ask:
What is social media giving people that traditional news isn’t?
And perhaps democracy has another question to answer too:
What happens when keeping up with the truth starts to feel like a full-time job?
This weeks blog was inspired by this podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2393977/episodes/19612748
As usual partly written with AI as there aren’t enough hours in the day.