TY - JOUR
T1 - Camouflaged propaganda
T2 - A survey experiment on political native advertising
AU - Dai, Yaoyao
AU - LUQIU, Rose L W
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Amber Boydstun, Matt Golder, Sona Golder, Arthur Lupia, Benjamin Radford, David Szakonyi, Rory Truex, and the anonymous reviewers, as well as audiences at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association and the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association for their helpful comments on this paper. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding Information:
This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - We examine a new form of propaganda, political native advertising, in which political actors, including foreign governments, buy space in independent media outlets to publish advertisements that are camouflaged as standard news stories. Those who engage in this form of propaganda hope to exploit the higher credibility of the hosting media site to enhance the persuasiveness of their message. Despite the obvious political implications and ethical issues at stake, political native advertising has received almost no scholarly attention. Our article begins to redress this imbalance. Using an online survey experiment with real political native advertisements in the Washington Post and The Telegraph bought by the Chinese government, we provide some of the first empirical evidence on basic but important features of political native advertising. We find, among other things, that respondents struggle to distinguish political advertisements from standard news stories regardless of their level of education and media literacy, that political advertisements are more convincing if they appear on and are perceived as news from an independent hosting media site than in a government-controlled news outlet, and that trust in the hosting media site declines if the political advertisement is detected.
AB - We examine a new form of propaganda, political native advertising, in which political actors, including foreign governments, buy space in independent media outlets to publish advertisements that are camouflaged as standard news stories. Those who engage in this form of propaganda hope to exploit the higher credibility of the hosting media site to enhance the persuasiveness of their message. Despite the obvious political implications and ethical issues at stake, political native advertising has received almost no scholarly attention. Our article begins to redress this imbalance. Using an online survey experiment with real political native advertisements in the Washington Post and The Telegraph bought by the Chinese government, we provide some of the first empirical evidence on basic but important features of political native advertising. We find, among other things, that respondents struggle to distinguish political advertisements from standard news stories regardless of their level of education and media literacy, that political advertisements are more convincing if they appear on and are perceived as news from an independent hosting media site than in a government-controlled news outlet, and that trust in the hosting media site declines if the political advertisement is detected.
KW - China Watch
KW - disinformation campaign
KW - native advertising
KW - political native advertising
KW - propaganda
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85090051800&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/2053168020935250
DO - 10.1177/2053168020935250
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85090051800
SN - 2053-1680
VL - 7
JO - Research and Politics
JF - Research and Politics
IS - 3
ER -