Trust in news stories on Facebook depends more on who they're shared by, not who wrote them : study

Social media users are becoming increasingly skeptical about news outlets, and now decide whether to believe a story based on whether a person they trust has shared it, not where it came from, says a landmark US study.


“The experimental results show that people who see an article from a trusted sharer, but one written by an unknown media source, have much more trust in the information than people who see the same article from a reputable media source shared by a person they do not trust,” write the authors of the research, conducted by the Media Insight Project.

For the experiment, the authors took a real news article about diabetes, and placed it in a simulated Facebook feed in front of 1,489 adult Americans. But while the text was the same for all participants, several things were different.

For some users, clicking on the article produced a link to AP, a real news agency, for others DailyNewsReview.com, a fake website, made up for the experiment.

The article also appeared on the participants’ feeds as if it were shared by one of eight different people, from Oprah Winfrey to the US surgeon general. Before starting the survey, respondents were asked how much they trusted each of the eight public figures.....https://on.rt.com/86dk
 RT.COM
20/3/17