Says Who?: How News Presentation Format Influences Perceived Believability and the Engagement Level of Social Media Users

Kim, Antino; Dennis, Alan R.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2987866

Cited by 16 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…These source ratings would then be applied to articles when they are first published, the same way that sellers on eBay and other e-commerce sites have their ratings applied to all new products they offer for sale. Research shows that source ratings influence the extent to which users believe social media stories [25] and influence online news consumption [4].…”

Section: Prior Theory and Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, people are more likely to believe information that matches their pre-existing opinions (i.e., attitude homophily or alignment [2,20]). Past research shows that confirmation bias has a significant effect on the belief in articles posted on social media [25].…”

Section: Information Processing In Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Confirmation bias was assessed using two items that were self-reported by participants [25]. The first was the participant's position on the headline ( 3= extremely negative to 3= extremely positive).…”

Section: Independent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The believability of each article was measured using three 7-point items (How believable do you find this article, How truthful do you find this article, How credible do you find this article) [25]. Reliability (Cronbach's alpha) was 0.96, which is adequate.…”

Section: Dependent Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

“…About 60% of adults get news from social media (primarily Facebook), and the proportion is increasing [15], suggesting that the problem will likely worsen [34]. In addition, past research shows that users are poor at assessing whether a news story on social media is real or fake [39] because confirmation bias leads them to believe articles that align with their a priori beliefs and disbelieve those that do not [25]. As a result, more fake news articles are shared on social media than real news [39], and fake news also spreads faster than real news [47].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Do You Really Know If It’s True? How Asking Users to Rate Stories Affects Belief in Fake News on Social Media

et al. 2018

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The rise of "fake news" has become a major concern for social media platforms. In response, Facebook has proposed and tested the idea of users flagging and rating news articles and sources, much akin to how consumers rate products and services on the Internet. One obvious challenge with this crowdsourced rating approach is whether the users really know enough to rate news articles and sources. Perhaps, a side benefit of asking users to evaluate an article-and asking about their personal experience with the event described in the article-is making them realize that they do not know enough about the event to make an accurate judgment, thus pushing them to become more skeptical. We asked 68 social media users to assess the believability of 42 social media headlines. We found that, while users were generally more likely to believe articles that agreed with their point of view, asking users to rate pushed them to think more critically about the truthfulness of the articles. Moreover, once users had been asked to rate some articles, they remained critical of other articles as well, even without the rating prompt. Overall, our findings suggest that asking users to evaluate the truthfulness of articles may not only produce rating information that can be a useful reference at a later point in time but also have an immediate benefit of alerting users to think more critically about all articles they see.

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Section: Prior Theory and Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%