How persuasive are political cheapfakes disseminated via social media? The effects of out-of-context visual disinformation on message credibility and issue agreement

Although extant research offered first insights into the effects of visual disinformation, we know markedly little about the effects of cheapfakes that rely on the deceptive re-contextualization of authentic visual materials disseminated via social media. Against this backdrop, we rely on online experiments (N = 874) and (N = 733) in which we exposed representative samples of participants to different types of (visual) disinformation in which the out-of-context presentation of visual material was central. Our findings indicate that cheapfakes based on video editing are not more credible than textual or image-only visual disinformation, while disinformation in general can lower support for a delegitimized politician. As a key contribution, we show that when cheapfakes are endorsed by other online users, they can mislead people and therewith succeed in delegitimizing targeted political actors, although richer modalities used in cheapfakes do not amplify deceptive content’s impact.