Do People Actually Learn From Fact-Checking?

Though fact-checking’s prominence has grown in recent years, little is known about public attitudes towards the format or how fact-checking exposure a ects the accuracy of people’s beliefs about controversial political issues. In the current political environment, it is especially important to understand whether fact-checking can e ectively counter incorrect and misleading claims made by politicians. To assess fact-checking’s influence on factual beliefs, we randomly exposed a representative panel of Americans to receive fact-checking or placebo content over multiple survey waves during the 2014 campaign. Our findings indicate that fact-checking exposure significantly increases the accuracy of people’s beliefs, especially among individuals with high political knowledge. We find only limited evidence that these e ects vary by whether the fact-check is politically congenial to respondents. While Republicans feel less positively about fact-checking than Democrats, fact-checking improves belief accuracy among Republicans and Democrats for both belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent items.