Media Literacy Training Backfires for Ruling-Party Supporters in India

📌 Why this matters

Misinformation undermines democratic governance, especially in developing countries with low average education, rapidly expanding Internet access, and widespread encrypted information sharing. A field experiment in India asked whether a short, in-person media literacy lesson could improve citizens' ability to spot false or misleading political claims during the 2019 elections.

📊 Field experiment during the 2019 elections

A randomized field trial enrolled 1,224 respondents around the 2019 Indian national election. Treated respondents received an hour-long, in-person media literacy training delivered by enumerators. The training was presented as a single, coherent learning module and its impact was measured by respondents' ability to identify misinformation in political stories.

🧭 What the training taught

• Inoculation strategies against misleading claims
• How corrections work and how to weigh them
• Practical steps for verifying potentially false information

🧾 Key findings

• On average, the hour-long media literacy intervention did not produce a statistically significant increase in respondents' ability to identify misinformation (N = 1,224).
• Among respondents who support the ruling party, those who received the training became significantly less able to identify stories that were favorable to their own attitudes (pro-attitudinal stories).

🔎 What this implies

The results indicate both the resilience of misinformation in the Indian context and the operation of motivated reasoning even within a historically less-ideological party system. Short, one-off pedagogical interventions may have limited effectiveness on average and can have perverse effects for partisans exposed to congenial misinformation, underscoring the need to account for partisan biases when designing counter-misinformation programs.