The year 2024 has featured a series of pivotal and hotly contested elections around the world, and the U.S. presidential election — the campaign for which has gone through a whipsaw of a summer, to say the least — is still to come. The timing is right, then, to take stock of a key question that looms large: Why do so many people around the world express so little trust in elections, and what impact do news and social media have in ameliorating or exacerbating election misinformation?

Enter this special issue of the esteemed journal Public Opinion Quarterly. It opens with an essay by the issue editors arguing that while the number of countries with elections has grown, the level of trust that voters express in the electoral process has fallen to worrying levels in many parts of the world — not to mention there are growing number of citizens, even in well-established democracies, who refuse to recognize legitimate elections as free and fair (see the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol). “Political polarization, social divisions, and the rapid spread of misinformation have all been related to enhanced widespread skepticism about the quality of national elections,” the special issue editors write.

But a lot of questions remain about the precise role of media and tech platforms in this global crisis of trust in elections. This is particularly so because, let’s face it, the information landscape has become wildly complicated and cacophonous in the digital era: long gone are the days when people typically relied on a few traditional sources — such as the press, TV ads, and conversations with family and friends — to make sense of politics and elections.

Let’s consider three articles from the special issue that offer some useful clues about the crisis.

The first paper — “The electoral misinformation nexus: How news consumption, platform use, and trust in news influence belief in electoral misinformation,” by Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Sayan Banerjee, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen — explores beliefs in electoral misinformation by examining people’s online news consumption during the contentious 2022 Brazilian presidential campaign. Because relying on self-reported measures (e.g., surveys and interviews) can be less reliable than looking at behavior directly, the researchers gathered web and mobile tracking of 2,200 internet users in Brazil, resulting in a dataset of 42 million clicks in links and apps. They combined that with online surveys involving the same research participants, and did that before, during, and after the election. Their goal was to isolate the role and influence of the type of news consumed — and people’s attitudes about those sources of news — in connection with beliefs about electoral misinformation.

Read the full article about election misinformation by Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis at Nieman Lab.