Comparing High-Quality News Boost against Standard Misinformation Inoculation Interventions

Misinformation remains a threat to democracies worldwide. Studies show that a range of interventions – such as exposure to debunked information from fact-checkers, and tips from digital literacy organisations – can inoculate people against misinformation (Maertens et al. 2025). However, other recent studies point to these interventions also having negative unintended effects, such as an increase in news skepticism and distrust in key societal actors and institutions (Hoes et al. 2024). A plausible explanation is that inoculation interventions often emphasise maliciousness, and nudge people to be cautious about any new information. In this study we assess an alternative inoculation strategy that should not increase people’s skepticism nor distrust towards key political institutions: a high-quality news boost. We embed this intervention in a 2-wave panel survey in Spain, where participants are asked in both waves to rate the accuracy of eight claims, balanced by veracity (true/false), ideology (conservative/liberal), and two globally salient topics (immigration and climate change). In wave 2 only, participants also rate an additional set of true/false claims related to events that took place between waves. For four weeks (three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), we ask participants to read news from a mainstream news outlet (El Pais or El Mundo). We then leverage the panel nature of the data and compare between-wave changes in their misperceptions (belief in false information), skepticism (doubting true information), belief accuracy (difference between the two) and trust in key democratic actors (the news, journalists, and scientists), to those of a control group and of two other groups exposed to traditional inoculation strategies: fact-checked information and digital literacy training. We partner with the main fact-checking (Maldita) and digital literacy (LearnToCheck) organisations in Spain to expose participants to realistic interventions. Participants will be delivered the treatment via separate websites managed by the researchers and updated three times a week. Throughout the intervention period, each participant will be exposed to up to 22 articles. For the claims that participants rate only in wave 2, we explore differences in misperceptions, skepticism, and accuracy belief only between experimental groups, given the cross-sectional nature of this part of the data. Note that this study is part of a larger project in which we measure the effects of our interventions on several other outcomes: individuals’ policy positions, their ability to distinguish between deepfakes and real videos, and trust in AI. In the same OSF repository you can find additional pre-registered analyses regarding the same intervention.