Skepticism, Suspicion, and Modern Social Media
Written by Sean Pearson
Facebook was released to the public in 2008 and has since seen a user base grow at an unmatched rate in the social media landscape. The 2.8 billion active users on Facebook have prompted researchers to begin investigating the various effects and implications of social media usage. As many will recall, the 2016 U.S presidential election brought social media misinformation to the forefront of the West’s attention. During this time, the amount of misinformation continued to grow unhindered, with some claims that Facebook’s algorithm favoured misleading information. Social media is full of legitimate and illegitimate news organizations spreading their message, while the number of people using sources such as Facebook to receive the news has been growing exponentially. In 2020, a survey found that 23% of Americans received their news on social media (Pew Research Center, 2021). These developments now pose significant challenges to theories concerning news media, because most were developed while print and broadcast media were still the prominent news sources.
The article being discussed here is part of the movement to modernize media research by examining comment sections of social media, and how they affect people’s perception of news articles (Gearhart, Moe, & Zhang, 2020). The authors sought to learn how the contents of comment sections affected perceptions of bias and credibility. Specifically, the authors wanted to find out whether the reader’s opinions on professional credibility (referring to the credibility of the news outlet) and civic credibility (referring to the credibility of the author of the article) depended on how positive or negative the comment sections were on social media posts.
The authors sampled 670 Facebook users, and randomly assigned the users to one of six conditions. Each condition involved pre-test questions, followed by reading a news article related to gun control or abortion posted on Facebook. Along with the news article that the participant saw, a comment section appeared containing disagreeable, agreeable, or neutral comments on the article. After participants read the article and the comments, they rated their perceptions about the news outlet that hosted the article, and the writer of the article (journalist).
The authors found that negative comments biased perceptions about both the news outlet and the journalist. When participants read comment sections containing agreeable comments, they perceived the news outlet, article, and journalist as less biased against their opinion, compared to the group that read disagreeable comments. The like-minded-comment group also reported higher ratings of professional and civic credibility than the group exposed to disagreeable comment sections.
This study shows that supplementary information (e.g., comment sections) on social media affects how we perceive news. This study also shows that agreeable comments increase the likelihood that users will consider the article to be credible. This latter tendency could support current hypotheses on how misinformation spreads on social media (see Del Vicario et al., 2014). In the age of misinformation, critical thinking is a critical tool to navigate the onslaught of news updates found on social media. The study summarized here highlights how easy it is for social media users to fall for misinformation and fake news when they are active on these platforms.
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References
Gearhart, S., Moe, A., & Zhang, B. (2020). Hostile media bias on social media: Testing the effect of user comments on perceptions of news bias and credibility. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 2(2), 140-148. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.185
Del Vicario, M., Vivaldo, G., Bessi, A., Zollo, F., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., & Quattrociocchi, W. (2016). Echo chambers: Emotional contagion and group polarization on Facebook. Scientific Reports, 6(1), 37825-37825. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep37825
Walker, M & Eva Matsa, K. (2021, September 20). News consumption across social media in 2021. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/09/20/news-consumption-across-social-media-in-2021/
Disclaimer
The blog posts are for informational and educational purposes only. The posts should not be considered as any type of advice (medical, mental health, legal, and/or religious advice). All blog posts have been researched, written, and edited by the undergraduate students and alumni of the Lifespan Cognition Lab. As a teaching and research-based lab, we encourage all lab members to help make knowledge more accessible to all communities through these posts.
