When Do Audiences Verify? How Perceptions About Message and Source Influence Audience Verification of News Headlines

Edgerly, Stephanie; Mourão, Rachel R.; Thorson, Esther; Tham, Samuel M.

doi:10.1177/1077699019864680

Cited by 75 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Verifying the news' reliability requires the willingness to go beyond a readily available piece of information, the motivation to search for alternative views on the same issue, and the conviction that beliefs should change according to evidence (Bronstein et al, 2019). Thus, when there are incongruencies within the news they are reading, it behooves individuals to seek more information in external resources for assessment (Edgerly et al, 2020). Following this logic, people who are high on absolutism tend to stick to a single view (Lewandowsky et al, 2012), maintain pre-existing established beliefs when presented with new information (Kruglanski et al, 1993), and are less likely search for alternative information (Ford and Kruglanski, 1995), which is likely to hinder the detection of fake news.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going Viral: How Fear, Socio-Cognitive Polarization and Problem-Solving Influence Fake News Detection and Proliferation During COVID-19 Pandemic

et al. 2021

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In times of uncertainty, people often seek out information to help alleviate fear, possibly leaving them vulnerable to false information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we attended to a viral spread of incorrect and misleading information that compromised collective actions and public health measures to contain the spread of the disease. We investigated the influence of fear of COVID-19 on social and cognitive factors including believing in fake news, bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, and problem-solving—within two of the populations that have been severely hit by COVID-19: Italy and the United States of America. To gain a better understanding of the role of misinformation during the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also investigated whether problem-solving ability and socio-cognitive polarization were associated with believing in fake news. Results showed that fear of COVID-19 is related to seeking out information about the virus and avoiding infection in the Italian and American samples, as well as a willingness to share real news (COVID and non-COVID-related) headlines in the American sample. However, fear positively correlated with bullshit receptivity, suggesting that the pandemic might have contributed to creating a situation where people were pushed toward pseudo-profound existential beliefs. Furthermore, problem-solving ability was associated with correctly discerning real or fake news, whereas socio-cognitive polarization was the strongest predictor of believing in fake news in both samples. From these results, we concluded that a construct reflecting cognitive rigidity, neglecting alternative information, and black-and-white thinking negatively predicts the ability to discern fake from real news. Such a construct extends also to reasoning processes based on thinking outside the box and considering alternative information such as problem-solving.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going Viral: How Fear, Socio-Cognitive Polarization and Problem-Solving Influence Fake News Detection and Proliferation During COVID-19 Pandemic

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…While people used to accuse the media of being biased, "fake" might have become a convenient way of accusing news outlets of producing news with which individuals disagree. More importantly, as people are unable to check the validity of every piece of information they encounter, they are likely to only fact-check information with which they disagree (Edgerly et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivated Fake News Perception: The Impact of News Sources and Policy Support on Audiences’ Assessment of News Fakeness

Tsang

2020

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

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An online experiment ( N = 280) exposed participants in Hong Kong to an anti-police WhatsApp news message during the extradition bill controversy. Although source verification is commonly recommended as a strategy to avoid being deceived by fake news, the findings did not reveal that the news source (legacy news outlet vs. online forum vs. no source) impacted the perceived fakeness of the news message. Nonetheless, participants holding opposing stances were found to perceive the same news message to be fake to significantly varying degrees, providing evidence that motivated reasoning plays in the spread of fake news.

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“…News headlines concisely convey the key message of the article [37] and thus have been extensively studied [11]. In this work, we examine framing in news headlines published by liberal and conservative media collected from AllSides.com [1].…”

Section: Microframes In Partisan Newsmentioning

confidence: 99%

FrameAxis: characterizing microframe bias and intensity with word embedding

Kwak

Jing

et al. 2021

PeerJ Computer Science

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Framing is a process of emphasizing a certain aspect of an issue over the others, nudging readers or listeners towards different positions on the issue even without making a biased argument. Here, we propose FrameAxis, a method for characterizing documents by identifying the most relevant semantic axes (“microframes”) that are overrepresented in the text using word embedding. Our unsupervised approach can be readily applied to large datasets because it does not require manual annotations. It can also provide nuanced insights by considering a rich set of semantic axes. FrameAxis is designed to quantitatively tease out two important dimensions of how microframes are used in the text. Microframe bias captures how biased the text is on a certain microframe, and microframe intensity shows how prominently a certain microframe is used. Together, they offer a detailed characterization of the text. We demonstrate that microframes with the highest bias and intensity align well with sentiment, topic, and partisan spectrum by applying FrameAxis to multiple datasets from restaurant reviews to political news. The existing domain knowledge can be incorporated into FrameAxis by using custom microframes and by using FrameAxis as an iterative exploratory analysis instrument. Additionally, we propose methods for explaining the results of FrameAxis at the level of individual words and documents. Our method may accelerate scalable and sophisticated computational analyses of framing across disciplines.

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When Do Audiences Verify? How Perceptions About Message and Source Influence Audience Verification of News Headlines

Cited by 75 publications

References 27 publications

Going Viral: How Fear, Socio-Cognitive Polarization and Problem-Solving Influence Fake News Detection and Proliferation During COVID-19 Pandemic

Going Viral: How Fear, Socio-Cognitive Polarization and Problem-Solving Influence Fake News Detection and Proliferation During COVID-19 Pandemic

Motivated Fake News Perception: The Impact of News Sources and Policy Support on Audiences’ Assessment of News Fakeness

FrameAxis: characterizing microframe bias and intensity with word embedding

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