Social credibility online: The role of online comments in assessing news article credibility

Abstract

This 2 × 2 experimental study (N = 196) tested the effects of source expertise and opinion valence in readers’ comments on the credibility of an online news story about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Source expertise had a significant influence on perceptions of article credibility; articles were judged more credible when public comments embedded in the story were from expert sources (e.g., scientists) rather than nonexpert sources (e.g., Twitter users). Effects were larger on high-frequency news users, regardless of whether comments were for or against GMOs. Results suggest that Internet users mainly use the peripheral or heuristic route of information processing to evaluate online news credibility. The importance for online journalism of social heuristics via opinions of other people is discussed.

Hostile media bias on social media: Testing the effect of user comments on perceptions of news bias and credibility

“…Others have found that exposing news audiences to expert opinions, as opposed to the opinions of other social media users, led to higher perceptions of news credibility (Pjesivac, Geidner, & Cameron, ). However, that work examined the opinions embedded in a sidebar of a news article (i.e., seen alongside the text of an article), which are different than comments seen on a Facebook post advertising a story and seen before reading the news article.…”

Online news media website ranking using user-generated content

“…There are several previous methods for analyzing and evaluating the performance of websites from different domains [5,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][15][16][17][18][19]. These methods mostly evaluate the website as an interface and study different aspects such as website's design, content, accessibility, and usability [5] and have been used for various domains such as ecommerce websites [13], e-government websites [82], agritourism websites [21], tourism management [22], library websites [23] and news websites [5,[24][25][26].…”

The effectiveness of credibility indicator interventions in a partisan context

“…While the connections between systems of heuristic credibility cues and the perception of credibility seem obvious, much of the literature focuses on a checklist approach to researching how cues affect the perception of credibility. Studies isolate heuristics such news brand names (Metzger, 2007;Sundar & Nass, 2001), source credibility (Pjesivac, Geidner & Cameron, 2018), platform publisher (Bhandari, 2018), number of social recommendations (Xu, 2013), or website features (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007) to find the effects of cues on the perception of credibility.…”