A majority of California voters, regardless of party, race and age, view political disinformation as a serious problem and there is little agreement on who to trust, a new poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found.

Just over half of voters polled for the poll said not knowing whether information is accurate and truthful is a “major problem,” while a third called it a “minor problem.”

In addition to the ubiquity of disinformation, there is a major disruption of information of any kind, good or bad. Fifty-eight percent of voters generally have little confidence in political and election information they receive from the mainstream media, the poll found.

But even more, 79% reported little confidence in election news they see on social media such as Facebook, Twitter (now known as X), and TikTok.

Confidence in the mainstream news is strongly divided among political parties. 57% of California Democrats, but only 15% of Republicans, said they have moderate or high levels of trust in the mainstream media.

If we don’t live in the same reality as each other, we don’t operate on the same basic principles of facts and truth, we can’t function as a democracy, said

Kim Nalder, California State University Sacramento Sacramento State

professor of political science and expert on political disinformation.

How do you evaluate candidates or claims or policies if you don’t know what’s true and what’s false?” Nalder asked. “It undermines the idea that we vote based on our own values, beliefs and experiences.”

Most California voters 67% rely on local television and radio for political news, the poll found, followed by 54% who cited reference materials and online searches and 44% who watch newspapers or magazines, whether online or in print.

Media use varies predictably by age. Just over half of voters aged 65 and older said they use newspapers and magazines to get information, compared to just under a third of voters aged 18 to 29.

Young voters reported slightly more trust in election news on social media: 25% of those aged 18 to 29, compared to 10% of those aged 65 and over.

It’s not surprising that people think there’s misinformation and disinformation on social media, because there is, Nalder said. They are not wrong.

Misinformation can spread quickly on social media, leading to violence, such as the attack on the husband of former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). It can also affect local elections. In 2016, Russian agents used fake social media accounts, especially Facebook and Instagram, to create confusion during the presidential election and advance their favorite candidate, Donald Trump.

In turn, since the 2020 election, the former Republican president has used social media to spread disinformation about the result of that vote, falsely claiming he defeated his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

The new poll also points to how campaigns are exacerbating inequality in the electorate.

Previous polls by the Berkeley Institute have indicated that California’s voters, especially those who vote routinely, are whiter and older than the state’s population. Campaigns tend to target those mainstream voters rather than focusing on increasing turnout, among other things, the new poll found.

Nearly two-thirds of mainstream voters, people who voted in at least five of the seven state elections held since 2018, reported in the poll that political campaigns contacted at least several times a week in the weeks leading up to last year’s midterm elections. had included them. Of registered voters who had not previously voted, only 30% reported frequent contacts from campaigns.

When you’re bombarded with information from multiple campaigns just before an election, you know for sure an election is coming,” said Mark DiCamillo, the polling director at the Berkeley Institute.

Whereas if you don’t get information at all or very rarely, you know, you just go about your normal life, and it probably leads to fewer votes,” he said. So it’s kind of a snowball effect.

In California, this means that white voters receive campaign mailers, texts, emails, and phone calls more often than voters of color. About half of Latino voters report being contacted only occasionally or never, compared to 38% of white voters.

It certainly makes sense for the campaigns to go to the people they know will vote if they start investing their money, DiCamillo said. It is logical. But in terms of representative democracy, it’s certainly not great.

The poll was funded in part by the Evelyn and Walter Haas

,

Jr. Fund, polled a sample of 6,164 registered California voters via email in late July. The poll sample was weighted to match the census and voter registration benchmarks. By weighing, the

margin of error of the results is imprecise, but estimated to be accurate margin of error estimates are difficult, but the results are estimated to have a margin of error of

2 percentage points in either direction for the entire sample.

The survey found that 2 in 3 voters are satisfied with basic election information that California and local governments put out, such as when and how to vote. Democrats

were more likely than other voters

express satisfaction with government information 80%

said to be satisfied

compared to 50% of Republicans and 63% of Independent voters.

In California, the Republicans are the minority party, and they are very much themselves

–

Aware of that

that they have no influence. They look from the outside in, DiCamillo said. So they’re kind of cynical about the whole process.

Misinformation and propaganda have long plagued democracy, he said

Anna Bridgeman

, policy director at the interest group Rebuild Local News. But trust in institutions has declined abruptly, starting around the time of the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

Trust used to be a lot like oxygen, like it used to be some sort of environment, Brugmann said. Trust in all institutions has declined exponentially. And that relates to local news, and it relates to national news; but it also pertains to government, higher education institutions, all those other institutions that provide a healthy civic environment. We can therefore no longer count on ambient trust.

People who are victims of a deluge of information can find it difficult to sort out which sources are reliable, especially around election time when political messages flood the information channels. Rebuild Local News has a name for politically funded campaigns disguised as real news: pink slime.

Pink slime is packaged information to look like local news. And it could surprise almost anyone, I think, except a very discerning viewer, Brugmann said. It’s like local news. It feels like local news. … It’s really hard for credible information to compete with that because credible information is a lot more expensive.

The good news, according to Nalder, is that people are really hungry for good information.

The younger people coming into the political world may be so tired of this that they start looking for good information again, she said. After a pause, she laughed: I hope so.