Digital Fact-Checking in the Age of AI: Trust, Privacy, and the Everyday Practices of Truthfulness Verification

The article was created as a developed and refined version of the authors’ submission for Infra4NextGen Hackathon—Analyzing CRONOS Data and Communicating Key Insights to Policy Makers. The submission won in the Make it Digital category and was recognized with a special prize for the relevance of its topic.

doi:10.26412/psr233.04

I4NG Hackathon 2025

"Make it Digital" Pillar: CROss-National Online Survey (CRONOS) and The European Social Survey (ESS) Data Analysis for Policy Brief

📌 Project Overview

The project was developed as part of the I4NG Hackathon 2025 and focuses on understanding what influences Europeans’ confidence in digital fact-checking and how to strengthen these skills through policy recommendations.

📊 Key Findings

• Only 30% of Europeans feel confident in their ability to verify online information.
• 67% of frequent internet users lack confidence in digital fact-checking.
• Confidence is associated with:
  • Ability to find product/service information online
  • Digital privacy skills: cookie restriction and social media profile access control
  • Trust in scientists (positive effect)
  • General trust in others (negative effect)

🧠 Policy Recommendations

1. Mirror Online Shopping Behaviors
   Design fact-checking training that mimics familiar digital consumer habits.

2. Integrate with Digital Privacy
   Combine fact-checking education with privacy tools and practices.

3. Clarify Trust Boundaries
   Emphasize the difference between real-world trust and online information trust.

4. Support Academic Communication
   Train scholars to share evidence-based knowledge in accessible ways.

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Read the full policy brief or see supplementary tables.

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📂 Data Sources

This project uses open data from the following sources:

• CRONOS3 Wave 1, edition 1.1
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2025) CRONOS3 Wave 1. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/cronos3-w1.

• ESS11 - integrated file, edition 3.0
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2025) ESS11 - integrated file, edition 3.0 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess11e03_0.

• ESS10 – Integrated File, edition 3.2
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023) ESS10 - integrated file, edition 3.2 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess10e03_2.

• ESS10 Self-Completion – Integrated File, edition 3.1
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023) ESS10 Self-completion - integrated file, edition 3.1 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess10sce03_1.

Countries included: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
Sample size: n = 9,538 (internet users only).

🔁 Reproducibility

To reproduce the analysis:

1. Create a folder named data in your working directory.
2. Download the .sav files from the sources above.
3. Place them in the data folder.
4. Run the R scripts provided in this repository.

All supplementary tables and code are available in this repo.

👥 Authors

• Jakub Adamski – jakub.adamski@uni.lodz.pl

• Remigiusz Żulicki – remigiusz.zulicki@ni.lodz.pl

Faculty of Economics and Sociology, University of Lodz, Poland

📄 License

This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0