Abstract

People increasingly turn to social media to get their daily news updates. Still, we are only beginning to understand how this development affects people’s perceptions of consumed news stories. The article reports on an experiment designed to investigate the effect the distribution of a news story in social media (Facebook) has on news message credibility. A control group was exposed to a news story on an original news website, and treatment groups were exposed to the same news story shared on Facebook. Results demonstrate that distribution via Facebook affects the credibility of the news story. The effect is strongest when politicians are intermediary-senders, and to some extent depend on the party affiliation of intermediary-sender and the social media audience. In the context of fake news, the results are reassuring: people are less trustful of news they consume through social media. However, the results also suggest that social media news sharing can contribute to the long-term decrease in trust in news.

摘要

人们越来越多地转向社交媒体来获取每日新闻更新。尽管如此，我们才刚刚开始了解这种发展如何影响人们对消费新闻故事的看法。这篇文章报道了一项旨在调查新闻故事在社交媒体 (Facebook) 中的传播对新闻消息可信度的影响的实验。对照组接触原始新闻网站上的新闻报道，治疗组接触 Facebook 上分享的同一新闻报道。结果表明，通过 Facebook 进行分发会影响新闻报道的可信度。当政治家是中介发送者时效果最强，并且在某种程度上取决于中介发送者的党派关系和社交媒体受众。在假新闻的背景下，结果令人欣慰：人们对他们通过社交媒体消费的新闻不太信任。然而，结果还表明，社交媒体新闻分享会导致新闻信任度的长期下降。