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Bandaranayake, Sukitha

University of British Columbia

Election misinformation is an increasingly prevalent threat to democracy in Canada. This thesis seeks to expand on a very limited literature on fact-checking election misinformation by testing the efficacy of an election misinformation fact-check among a sample of 808 Canadians. Specifically, I deploy a survey experiment to explore whether a fact-check asserting that a fake CBC article alleging widespread voter fraud in Canada is entirely false helps mitigate the impact of election misinformation on satisfaction in the electoral process. I find a marginally higher satisfaction in Canada’s electoral process among respondents exposed to the election misinformation and subsequent fact-check, than among respondents exposed only to the election misinformation. However, the survey, designed under time constraints of a graduate seminar, has significant limitations vis-à-vis research design; therefore, an additional purpose of this thesis is to use this study to develop recommendations for future research with a more robust design.

Text

2024-09-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89160

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/