The Alternative Truth Kept Hidden From Us: The Effects of Multimodal Disinformation Disseminated by Ordinary Citizens and Alternative Hyper-Partisan Media

The affordances of social media potentially amplify the effects disinformation by offering possibility to present deceptive content and sources in credible native ways. We investigate two aspects related dissemination modality digital disinformation: (In)authentic references ordinary people as multimodal embedding content. Using a pre-registered experiment United States India (N = 1008), we found that adding decontextualized visuals on climate change did not its credibility or user engagement. Mimicking citizen cues has stronger effect than using an alternative hyper-partisan source communicate under certain conditions. Low levels trust preferences for information from vox populi moderate citizen-initiated disinformation, suggesting disenchanted citizens who oppose established may be most vulnerable attacks bots trolls.