The affinity between anti-establishment reality Perceptions and estimated misinformation salience across seven countries spanning the global north and south

News users are very concerned about mis- and disinformation. Arguably, they even arrive at disproportionally high estimates of the amount of false information they encounter, which may have detrimental consequences for their trust in factually accurate information. Yet, to date, we know little about how people’s risk perceptions differ across countries that are more or less resilient to mis- and disinformation, and to what extent the perceived salience of misinformation is rooted in anti-establishment perceptions on the reality conveyed by the media, society, and politics. To better understand this affinity across the Global North and South, we rely on a comparative survey study (N = 3,619). Main findings indicate that people with stronger populist attitudes, lower media trust, and more pronounced conspiracist mentalities are most likely to arrive at higher estimates of misinformation salience. Yet, although populist attitudes were strongly related to misinformation estimates in Brazil, conspiracists mentalities were related to high estimates of misinformation in all countries except for Brazil. In Latin American countries more generally, people with higher distrust in the media were most likely to arrive at high estimates of misinformation salience. Our findings have important implications for understanding the attitudinal antecedents of disproportionate misinformation perceptions across national contexts.