There has been a significant growth of social media as a means to inform oneself about politics. This article explores the consequences of this trend on the credibility audiences attribute to news exposing corrupt politicians and on their willingness to penalize the exposed politicians in elections. The study focuses on ten Latin American cities and employs a randomized control trial using experimental data embedded in a survey. Through this method, credibility and penalization levels are compared between state communications, newspapers, named journalists on social media, and anonymous journalists on social media. The article’s key findings demonstrate that corruption reports published on social media are deemed less credible than those published by state auditors and newspapers. This effect is exacerbated when the source of the report is anonymous. In addition, reports on corruption published on social media by anonymous sources have a negative effect on voter penalization of corrupt politicians.

社交媒体作为了解政治的一种方式，已经有了显着的增长。本文探讨了这种趋势对观众对揭露腐败政客的新闻的可信度的影响，以及他们对在选举中惩罚被曝光的政客的意愿的影响。该研究侧重于 10 个拉丁美洲城市，并使用调查中嵌入的实验数据进行了随机对照试验。通过这种方法，比较了国家通信、报纸、社交媒体上的命名记者和社交媒体上的匿名记者之间的可信度和处罚水平。该文章的主要发现表明，在社交媒体上发布的腐败报告被认为不如国家审计员和报纸发布的报告可信。当报告来源是匿名的时，这种影响会加剧。此外，匿名消息来源在社交媒体上发布的腐败报告对选民对腐败政客的惩罚产生了负面影响。