Thanks a lot for this, that's really interesting. Also thanks for being one of the very few people who provides data to back up their claims.

Although it's worth noting that this doesn't say anything about filtering, this is about how trustworthy people think various institutions are, not how good people are at distinguishing between true and false information.

The sticking point for me is more about how people decide what to trust and what percentage of the time they get it right. What do people actually earn when they say they're doing their own research"?

It's also worth noting the influence of heuristics like availability and recency bias. If you hear a lie enough times, it's hard to resist the conclusion that there must be something to it. And it's easy to trick people into drawing broad conclusions about groups based on very small sample sizes or tiny fragments of evidence.

The Springfield pet eating hoax was a good example of this. Lots of people believed this by the time it had been floating around for a while. And it was used to back a broader anti+immigrant sentiment, but it was based on literally nothing but a couple of out of context pictures and a random guy saying he saw a van with "hundreds of cats" in it.

I'm reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" at the moment and he's got some interesting research on this that I might fold into an article.👍