Lies and inaccurate information are as old as humanity, but never before have they been so easy to spread. Each moment of every day, the Internet and broadcast media purvey misinformation, either ...deliberately or accidentally, to a mass audience on subjects ranging from politics to consumer goods to science and medicine, among many others. Because misinformation now has the potential to affect behavior on a massive scale, it is urgently important to understand how it works and what can be done to mitigate its harmful effects. Misinformation and Mass Audiences brings together evidence and ideas from communication research, public health, psychology, political science, environmental studies, and information science to investigate what constitutes misinformation, how it spreads, and how best to counter it. The expert contributors cover such topics as whether and to what extent audiences consciously notice misinformation, the possibilities for audience deception, the ethics of satire in journalism and public affairs programming, the diffusion of rumors, the role of Internet search behavior, and the evolving efforts to counteract misinformation, such as fact-checking programs. The first comprehensive social science volume exploring the prevalence and consequences of, and remedies for, misinformation as a mass communication phenomenon, Misinformation and Mass Audiences will be a crucial resource for students and faculty researching misinformation, policymakers grappling with questions of regulation and prevention, and anyone concerned about this troubling, yet perhaps unavoidable, dimension of current media systems.
The prevalence of misinformation has spurred various interested parties—regulators, the media, and competing firms—to debunk false claims in the marketplace. This research examines whether such ...debunking messages provided by these parties can impact consumer purchase behavior. If so, does debunking effectively correct consumers’ misinformed beliefs—an ideal outcome from a policy maker's perspective—or does it merely reinforce correct beliefs, as predicted by biased belief updating? With theory providing contradictory predictions, the authors design and implement a conjoint experiment that enables measurement of willingness to pay under exposure to real-world misinformation and debunking messages. Focusing on three ingredients in product categories where misinformation is prevalent (aluminum in deodorant, fluoride in toothpaste, and genetically modified organisms in food), the authors find that debunking plays an important role in mitigating the impact of misinformation. More specifically, debunking can attenuate the decrease in willingness to pay caused by misinformation by correcting misbeliefs, a promising finding for policy makers. The authors discuss the incentives for firms to debunk misinformation or to introduce new products that conform to misinformation.
The authors show that deceptive advertising engenders distrust, which negatively affects people's responses to subsequent advertising from both the same source and second-party sources. This negative ...bias operates through a process of defensive stereotyping, in which the initial deception induces negative beliefs about advertising and marketing in general, thus undermining the credibility of further advertising.
Drip pricing practice, which involves promoting a seemingly low initial price and then introducing add-on price components without upfront disclosures, is commonly seen as a deceptive advertising ...practice that can lead to negative associations. Here, we provide an alternative perspective by investigating that whether consumers form positive or negative opinions about drip pricing depends on their expectation of encountering it and their overall familiarity with this practice. That is, this research reveals that when consumers' general familiarity with drip pricing is low, higher expectations of drip pricing create greater perceptions of price fairness and purchase intentions. Moreover, our findings indicate that higher consumer expectations of drip pricing lead to positive attributions and evaluations of the detailed pricing information, resulting in higher perceptions of price fairness, which, in turn, increases purchase intentions. Further, we show that when consumers have high expectations of encountering drip pricing, they evaluate pricing information more positively and deception less harshly, resulting in greater purchase intentions than when they do not expect it.
This article proposes that compared with a promotion regulatory focus, a prevention focus increases sensitivity to the advertiser's manipulative intent. Specifically, when message cues make ...manipulative intent moderately salient, prevention-focused people are more likely to activate persuasion knowledge and give less favorable brand evaluations than promotion-focused people. When message cues make manipulative intent highly salient or when manipulative intent is not salient, brand evaluations do not differ across regulatory foci. In addition, externally priming suspicion of manipulative intent makes promotion-focused people react similarly to prevention-focused people, suggesting that regulatory focus affects vigilance against persuasion.
One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal ...Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies' privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite over fifteen years of FTC enforcement, there is no meaningful body of judicial decisions to show for it. The cases have nearly all resulted in settlement agreements. Nevertheless, companies look to these agreements to guide their privacy practices. Thus, in practice, FTC privacy jurisprudence has become the broadest and most influential regulating force on information privacy in the United States—more so than nearly any privacy statute or any common law tort. In this Article, we contend that the FTC's privacy jurisprudence is functionally equivalent to a body of common law, and we examine it as such. We explore how and why the FTC, and not contract law, came to dominate the enforcement of privacy policies. A common view of the FTC's privacy jurisprudence is that it is thin, merely focusing on enforcing privacy promises. In contrast, a deeper look at the principles that emerge from FTC privacy "common law" demonstrates that the FTC's privacy jurisprudence is quite thick. The FTC has codified certain norms and best practices and has developed some baseline privacy protections. Standards have become so specific they resemble rules. We contend that the foundations exist to develop this "common law" into a robust privacy regulatory regime, one that focuses on consumer expectations of privacy, extends far beyond privacy policies, and involves a full suite of substantive rules that exist independently from a company's privacy representations.
Recent explosive growth in environmental and climate-related marketing claims by business firms has raised concerns about the truthfulness of these claims. Critics argue (or at least question ...whether) such claims constitute greenwashing, which refers to a set of deceptive marketing practices in which an entity publicly misrepresents or exaggerates the positive environmental impact of a product, a service, or the entity itself. The extent to which greenwashing can be regulated consistent with the First Amendment raises thorny doctrinal questions that have bedeviled both courts and scholars. The answers to these questions have implications far beyond environmental marketing claims. This Essay is the first to offer both doctrinal clarity and a normative approach to understanding how the First Amendment should tackle issues at the nexus of science, politics, and markets. It contends that the analysis should be driven by the normative values underlying the protection of speech under the First Amendment in the disparate doctrines that govern these three arenas. When listeners are epistemically dependent for information on commercial speakers, regulation of such speech for truthfulness is consistent with the First Amendment and subject to the laxer review of the commercial speech doctrine. This is because citizens must have accurate information not only to knowledgeably participate at the ballot box but also to have meaningful freedom in economic life itself.
With the advent of e-commerce, the potential of new Internet technologies to mislead or deceive consumers has increased considerably. This paper extends prior classifications of deception and ...presents a typology of product-related deceptive information practices that illustrates the various ways in which online merchants can deceive consumers via e-commerce product websites. The typology can be readily used as educational material to promote consumer awareness of deception in e-commerce and as input to establish benchmarks for good business practices for online companies. In addition, the paper develops an integrative model and a set of theory-based propositions addressing why consumers are deceived by the various types of deceptive information practices and what factors contribute to consumer success (or failure) in detecting such deceptions. The model not only enhances our conceptual understanding of the phenomenon of product-based deception and its outcomes in e-commerce but also serves as a foundation for further theoretical and empirical investigations. Moreover, a better understanding of the factors contributing to or inhibiting deception detection can also help government agencies and consumer organizations design more effective solutions to fight online deception.
This study examines the long-term efficacy of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) 2003 Red Flag Initiative, which aimed to curb the prevalence of deceptive claims in over-the-counter weight loss ...product advertising. The principal component of this effort was the FTC’s promotion of voluntary guidelines which encouraged media outlets to screen advertisements for the seven deceptive (“Red Flag”) claims prior to publication. By analyzing the content of English-language advertisement airings appearing in nationally circulated print magazines and on television programs between 2010 and 2011, this study evaluates the success of the Red Flag Initiative as a long-term regulatory solution to deceptive advertising in this market. This study finds that the FTC’s voluntary initiative failed to halt the dissemination of deceptive claims during the time period analyzed. In response to the FTC’s actions, manufacturers appear to have engaged in offsetting behaviors and employed other creative content to convey similar deceptive information in their advertising, allowing them to avoid scrutiny while continuing to mislead consumers.
