Imagine scrolling through your phone during an election campaign and seeing a post that makes you pause. It might be a claim about the economy, a political ad attacking a candidate, or a news headline that feels off. Do you fact-check it? Do you share it? Do you ignore it? Most of us would like to believe we are careful, rational consumers of information. But a recent study conducted during Australia’s 2025 federal election suggests otherwise. Rather than starting from the assumption that people are motivated to verify what they see, researchers wanted to understand what people actually do when they encounter political misinformation. To do this, they gave 38 Australians a digital diary and asked them to collect examples of political misinformation every day for seven days in the final stretch of the campaign. The participants, recruited from marginal electorates and balanced by age, gender, and news habits, sent in screenshots, links, and descriptions of content they suspected was misleading. In total, they submitted 254 examples. What emerged was a picture of a tired, overwhelmed, and deeply partisan information environment. The most striking finding? People rarely fact-check. Instead, they rely on their own instincts, their existing beliefs, and their perceptions of bias to decide what is true or false. When a claim contradicted what they already thought they knew, they labeled it misinformation. When it felt biased, they dismissed it. Only a tiny fraction of people went looking for authoritative sources to verify a claim.
The reasons people gave for judging something as misinformation reveal just how subjective this process really is. In 28 percent of the examples, participants said the content was wrong because it contradicted their existing knowledge or experience. That was the most common rationale. The second most common reason, at 22 percent, was that the content seemed biased. Another 17 percent said there was insufficient evidence or that the information was out of context. Emotional reactions, such as fearmongering, accounted for 13 percent, and the same proportion said the claims were simply implausible. Only 4 percent of the time did anyone verify the information by checking authoritative sources or asking trusted people. This tells us something important: for most people, misinformation is not something you prove. It is something you feel. If a post or article clashes with your worldview, it must be false. If a political opponent is attacking a party you support, that is bias, not fact. The researchers also looked at how certain participants were about their judgments. The highest levels of certainty came when content was judged as contrary to existing knowledge. In other words, the closer the information got to people’s core beliefs, the more confident they were that it was false. The examples are telling. One participant flagged a television ad that cited OECD figures showing Australia had experienced a larger fall in disposable income than other OECD countries. The participant called it false and a scare tactic, because they believed the Labor government had performed well economically. Another participant dismissed a news article about a Coalition proposal to move public servants to regional areas, saying it was ridiculous that anyone could be forced to relocate. Both claims were later verified as true by a professional fact checker. Yet to the people who encountered them, they felt like misinformation.
When it came to taking action, the most common response was to do absolutely nothing. Forty-four percent of the time, participants simply moved on. They did not report the content, fact-check it, or even re-read it. The second most common action, at 21 percent, was sharing or discussing the misinformation with others. That might sound surprising, but in an election context, sharing is often a way of signaling your political identity rather than a serious attempt to inform. Seventeen percent of the time, participants searched online for more information, but that does not necessarily mean they consulted fact-checking websites. Ten percent reread or scrutinized the content more carefully without any external verification. The rest dismissed it emotionally, ignored it, or deleted it. Only a tiny fraction reported the content to a platform. This pattern makes sense in a world where people are drowning in information. The online environment is cluttered, noisy, and exhausting. During an election, the flood of posts, ads, and headlines becomes even more intense. People develop mental shortcuts just to get through the day. They rely on repetition and familiarity, which is exactly why the illusory truth effect is so powerful. The more we see something, the more likely we are to believe it is true, even if it is false. And because accepting information is automatic while rejecting it requires effort, people tend to go with their gut. When you combine information overload with political burnout, fact-checking becomes an unreasonable demand. It is not that people cannot tell truth from lies. It is that they do not have the energy or motivation to try.
Perhaps the most alarming finding is the gap between what ordinary people think is misinformation and what a professional fact checker found. An independent fact checker with more than a decade of experience examined all 254 examples submitted by participants. The results were stark. Only 10 percent of the examples were actually false. Thirty-seven percent were true. Twenty-four percent were misleading, 14 percent had no evidence, and 12 percent were missing context. Six percent were satire. In other words, the vast majority of what people believed was misinformation was not misinformation at all. This is a serious problem for democracy. If citizens cannot recognize actual misinformation, they cannot hold political actors accountable. At the same time, if they constantly dismiss factual information as “fake news” because it does not fit their beliefs, they become vulnerable to partisan manipulation. The fact checker’s results also varied depending on how participants made their judgments. Content that participants deemed implausible was actually true 44 percent of the time. Content judged to be lacking evidence was true 41 percent of the time. Emotional responses led to true content 39 percent of the time. Meanwhile, among the few cases where participants relied on external sources to validate a claim, only one was verified as false. This suggests that the very people who tried to check facts did so in a way that was not necessarily reliable, while those who trusted their instincts were often wrong. Almost half of the examples came from social media platforms, with Facebook at 19 percent and Instagram at 18 percent. Political parties and politicians were the most identified creators, accounting for 49 percent of the content. Mainstream news outlets made up 18 percent. One-third of the examples were paid political advertisements, but only 2 percent were AI-generated. This is a reminder that misinformation is not just a technology problem. It is human, political, and deeply embedded in how we see the world.
The implications of this study go far beyond one election. First, people reject information that contradicts their existing beliefs, even when that information is true. This is not simply ignorance. It is a cognitive bias called belief perseverance, and it is incredibly difficult to overcome. Once we have committed to a viewpoint, we interpret new information through that lens. A claim that threatens our identity feels like an attack, and our instinct is to push back. Second, the cluttered online environment disincentivizes fact-checking. When people are overwhelmed, they do not become more careful. They disengage. They retreat into trusted echo chambers. This is why some people believe obvious falsehoods and why others dismiss obvious facts. Third, low levels of media literacy make everything worse. People do not have the skills to recognize misleading statistics, missing context, or satirical content. They cannot distinguish between an opinion and a fact, or between a verified claim and a rumor. This is not just a problem for young people. It is a problem for all adults, especially those who are no longer in formal education. Media literacy education is often treated as a nice-to-have, but this study shows it is essential. Cognitive reflection, critical thinking, and intellectual humility are not academic buzzwords. They are survival skills in a democratic society. Intellectual humility, in particular, means being aware of the limits of your own knowledge and being open to new information. It allows people to say, “Maybe I am wrong.” Without that, no amount of fact-checking will help.
The study also points to the need for structural solutions. Citizens are not going to fact-check their way out of this crisis. The responsibility cannot rest entirely on individuals who are tired, distracted, and partisan. Australia does not have national truth-in-political-advertising laws, which means politicians and third parties are free to make unverified claims during election campaigns, knowing that most people will not check them and that those who do will often dismiss the correction as bias. The researchers suggest that stronger regulation is needed, alongside media literacy education and interventions like prebunking and debunking. But these interventions have mixed results. Forewarning people before they see misinformation, labeling content, and correcting false claims after the fact can all help, but they are not magic bullets. The most effective approach is probably a combination: regulation that prevents the worst abuses, education that builds critical thinking skills, and platforms that make accurate information easier to find. The study itself has limitations. It was small, involving only 38 participants in four marginal electorates in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. It only ran for seven days before the election, during a period when misinformation is particularly intense. It cannot be extrapolated to the entire Australian population. But its value lies in the depth of its observations. By following people in real time, researchers saw how ordinary citizens grapple with a polluted information environment. They saw that misinformation is not simply about false facts. It is about trust, identity, and exhaustion. People do not fact-check because they do not have the time, the skills, or the willingness to question their own beliefs. Until we address those underlying realities, political actors will continue to exploit the gap between what is true and what people are willing to believe.