Ecosystems of mistrust. Connecting news avoidance to critical citizenship

News avoidance identifies the practice of avoiding contents, sources, and channels based on personal criteria of quality or correspondence with one’s own value universe. It can be read as a response, on the part of the public, to the media ecosystem polluted by information disorders and the dynamics of information commercialisation. The article studies this dynamic through a survey that has involved 284 subjects between March and June 2022. The results suggest that the combination between a general dissatisfaction with news coverage and a high self-efficacy perception in detecting fake news could lead to a more engaged behaviour in scrutinising the media.