Social Media and Fake News Credibility

This major Yale University study addresses the issue of political misinformation, specifically through social media and fake news. This study found that tagging false news stories as “disputed by third party fact-checkers” has only a small impact on whether readers perceive their headlines as true. Overall, the study showed that the existence of “disputed” tags made participants only slightly more likely to correctly judge the headlines as false. The implications of this study are that there can be more awareness for potential issues surrounding acquiring news and information through social media platforms, where fake news can become reality.

Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2017). The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news stories increases perceived accuracy of stories without warnings. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3035384