Says Who? The Effects of Presentation Format and Source Rating on Fake News in Social Media

What drives unverified information sharing and cyberchondria during the COVID-19 pandemic?

“…Reports also suggest that some groups of people believe and spread false news due to ideological reasons (Wolfe, 2002). Indeed, prior work postulates confirmation bias as one of the primary causes why people share misinformation (Kim & Dennis, 2019). Studies have argued that the polarising impact of social media contributes to the spread of fake news by reinforcing the confirmation bias and creating and maintaining social echo-chambers where certain information rarely gets challenged (Spohr, 2017).…”

“…It is almost impossible to accurately determine whether a piece of news is reliable simply based on the news article itself (Del Vicario et al, 2016), and therefore, additional sources for verifying the information are needed. A recent study has demonstrated that nudging readers to pay attention to the news source lowers the sharing of misinformation (Kim & Dennis, 2019).…”

“…Based on our findings, we suggest intervention strategies which nudge people to consume manageable amounts of COVID-19 content through social media, could be effective in reducing the spread of misinformation and cyberchondria in this crisis situation. While nudging interventions have been found to be effective when dealing with artificially created and benign misinformation (e.g., celebrity gossip), their efficacy when applied to real and personally involved crises have yet to be empirically tested (Kim & Dennis, 2019). Additionally, due to COVID-19, many people are out of work or unable to partake in social activities, and thus have more time to consume social media content.…”

“…3 Misinformation is not a new problem. Since the beginning of this century, the quantity and dissemination of misinformation have grown exponentially (Kim & Dennis, 2019), ultimately leading the World Economic Forum to list online misinformation as one of the top 10 global threats to humanity in 2018. Prior research suggests that misinformation can fuel health anxiety (Lewis, 2006), poor health-related decisions (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) and impair individuals' and health officials' ability to accurately evaluate the severity of ongoing situations and take necessary actions (Kata, 2010;Sommerlad, 2020).…”

Misinformation sharing and social media fatigue during COVID-19: An affordance and cognitive load perspective

“…Previous studies have identified various intrinsic predictors for fake news sharing such as (1) SMF; (2) FoMO; (3) inexperience using the internet; (4) lack of information verification skills; (5) laziness; (6) information overload; and (7) online trust ( Laato et al., 2020a ; Khan and Idris, 2019 ; Talwar et al., 2019 ). Also, people are heavily impacted by confirmation bias, meaning they are more likely to believe information when it aligns with their pre-existing views regardless whether the information is reliable or not ( Kim and Dennis, 2019 ; Vicario et al., 2019 ). In the context of pandemics, physical proximity, and perceived severity of the situation have been shown to increase information sharing in general ( Huang et al., 2015 ).…”