The Effects of Fake News on Consumers’ Brand Trust

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore the effects of fake news on consumers’ brand trust in the food security context. The starting point of our research is the finding that issues related to food security cannot be addressed without the contribution of multinational food corporations. The efficiency of their intervention depends on their capacity to build and preserve their brand trust despite the multifarious fake news stories that contaminate the information flow. Is brand trust sensitive to fake news? In some cases, the spread of fake news in mass media and social media negatively affects food companies. In other cases, consumers’ trust remains relatively unchanged. These ambivalent reactions give us good reason to assess whether consumers’ exposure to negative fake news influences their trust in international food brands. Using a one-group pretest–posttest research design, we found that the effects of fake news on consumers’ brand trust are predominantly negative, but in a few cases, these effects can be neutral or positive. These results could be useful for PR and marketing researchers and professionals interested in fake news phenomena and brand trust because they shed light on the real threat fake news represents for multinational food companies.

The Mediation Effects of Social Media Usage and Sharing Fake News about Companies

“…Once exposed to fake news, consumers are more likely to trust the information if it is sponsored by a famous company [ 74 ]. The mixed effects of fake news on different stakeholders and especially on consumers varies according to source intention: they might be positive if the fake news portrays the brand positively, neutrally, or negatively if the brand is the target of the fake news [ 81 ]. As trust in the news media and social media declines and concerns of disinformation and echo chambers rise, individuals must develop methods for accessing and evaluating accurate and trustworthy information not only from politics [ 82 , 83 , 84 ] but also from business.…”

Can Fake News About Companies Lead to an Increased Social Media Usage? An Empirical Investigationnhancing the Attractiveness and Readability of Central Bank Reports: An Experiment

“…Fake news like parody (using sarcasm and exaggerations for comic effects rather than to harm audiences), misleading content (alter information to portray an issue or individual in a distorted light), imposter content (claiming to be someone else), fabricated content (intentionally spreading completely false content to deceive and inflict harm), false connection (news item's headline, aesthetic elements, and/or factual content do not make logical sense), false context (combining accurate and erroneous contextual information), manipulated content (falsifying authentic data or graphics in intended to mislead others) can be exploited in different ways on social media, aiming at influencing users cognitions, attitudes and behaviors (Wardle and Derakhshan, 2017;Fârte and Obadă, 2021), and, particularly, their social media usage. Fake news can on New Trends in Sustainable Business and Consumption increase web traffic (Mills et al, 2019) and, thus, could influence social media usage.…”