The Problem
The spread of fake news affects digital-native news consumers of college and post-college age, too. The increased reliance on online news raises questions about the credibility or quality of the information found online.
RQ1: How much attention do college students pay to heuristic cues that they assess news sources' credibility on Facebook?
RQ2: What attributes of online news would affect their perceptions of online credibility?
Research Objective: This study will ask college-age readers of news through Facebook what cues, either from the social media site or the posts they read in it, drive their assessments of what is or is not credible.
The Approach
This study uses a survey to explore how millennials read different cues in Facebook news posts regarding credibility. We designed, piloted, and executed a survey with 183 participants. We collected data and analyzed it to test variables related to user information processing on reading Facebook posts. Specifically, For each Facebook news post shown to participants, closed-ended questions were asked regarding overall credibility assessment and the relative importance of individual cues in making that assessment. Two Likert-type scale measures, one measuring source credibility and the other measuring each cue’s significance in the credibility assessment, were used for the research.
Results
Unfortunately, we didn’t find a significant relationship between the predictors of embedded hyperlinks, post source, and others’ engagement to perceived credibility in any articles since each of the regression models accounted for very little of the variance in credibility scores. This low accounting of variance could mean is that our respondents are actually paying the most attention to the content of the news posts rather than Facebook-generated heuristic cues.
One reason to explain that is our respondents are quite a media literate. With a relatively high capability of analyzing and evaluating media messages, it is possible that respondents would make more cognitive effort when they access the perceived source credibility and barely pay attention to the heuristic cues of the post.
Implications
We recommend that the algorithms of portals include source-based distinctions when selecting material to publish on their sites instead of simply scouring the web for the latest information and breaking news. When publishing the resulting stories, portals ought to clearly identify the original news media source on the interface.
Reflections
If I have more time and resources for this project, instead of asking participants for self-reported data, I would use eye-tracking to investigate where and how long an individual looks at a Facebook post. I believe this method not only provides more accurate behavioral data but also largely prevents social desirability bias from participants.
However, similar to other research methods, eye-tracking also has its own limitations. It cannot tell you why users are looking at something. Therefore, it is important to incorporate other qualitative methods to get a fuller picture, such as semi-structured interviews, to unpack the nuance and motivations of human behavior.