From trust in news to disagreement: is misinformation more controversial?

Abstract

The growing prevalence of fruitless disagreement threatens social cohesion and constructive public discourse. While polarised discussions often reflect distrust in the news, the link between disagreement and misinformation remains unclear. In this study, we used data from "Cartesio", an online experiment rating the trustworthiness of Italian news articles annotated for reliability by experts, to develop a disagreement metric that accounts for differences in mean trust values. Our findings show that while misinformation is rated as less trustworthy, it is not more controversial. Furthermore, disagreement correlates with increased commenting on Facebook. This suggests that combating misinformation alone may not reduce polarisation. Disagreement focuses more on the divergence of opinions, trust, and their effects on social cohesion. Our study lays the groundwork for unsupervised news analysis and highlights the need for platform design that promotes constructive interactions and reduces divisiveness.