ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that despite the media ecology’s potential for heightening misinformation exposure, cognitive biases, affective polarisation, and sorting are as much to blame for susceptibility to misinformation and the development of misperceptions as structural changes to the media. Media-based accounts depict exposure to misinformation as both a cause and a consequence of polarisation, where polarisation facilitates selective exposure in a high-choice context, and the misinformation is persuasive because it comes from like-minded sources. Cognitive and affective explanations portray media environment as more handmaiden than driver of misperceptions; instead, they point to the importance of polarisation in terms of how it affects misinformation processing upon exposure. Researchers are keenly interested in how polarisation and misinformation contribute to misperceptions. The fact that the digital media environment is thought to facilitate both polarisation and misinformation exposure makes it a natural place to look for causal explanations.
