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Social Media and Trust in News: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Facebook on News Story Credibility
Open accessAbstract
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.
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“Results from two studies suggest that personal political ideology or political afliation infuences participants' trust in information from social media [5,53].”
From What Do We Mean When We Talk about Trust in Social Media? A Systematic Review (2023) · cites this paper as [53]
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Cited by
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How do social media influencers induce the urge to buy impulsively? Social commerce context
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Metadata
- Authors
- Karlsen, R., & Aalberg, T.
- Affiliations
- University of Oslo (NO)
- Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NO)
- Corresponding author
- Karlsen, Rune
- Venue
- Digital Journalism
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2021-07-21
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 144-160
- ISSN
- 2167-0811 (ISSN-L)
- 2167-082X
- OpenAlex
- W3189018750
- Cited by
- 119
- References
- 56
- Citations by year
- 2026: 21 · 2025: 32 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 2
- FWCI
- 22.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Digital Journalism (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- Research Council of Norway (249687)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › News Media Framing and Political Communication
- Social Sciences › Communication › Journalism and Media Studies
- Keywords
- social media, Facebook, news credibility, trust in news, news sharing, politicians, political affiliation, fake news, news consumption
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