Social Media
Are the reward systems of social media platforms ENCOURAGING or DISCOURAGING the spread of misinformation?
ENCOURAGING the spread of misinformation!
“By constantly reinforcing sharing—any sharing—with likes and comments, platforms have created habitual users who are largely unconcerned with the content they post.”
People with low trust in the news media are more likely to prefer what type of news sources?
A) Non-mainstream sources (such as social media, blogs, and digital-born news outlets)
B) Mainstream sources (such as print newspapers and broadcast television)
A) Non-mainstream sources (such as social media, blogs, and digital-born news outlets)
“More specifically, those with low trust in the news are more likely to say that their main source of news is either social media, blogs, or news outlets that do not have either a print or broadcast legacy.”
What is the News Finds Me Perception (NFM)?
A) When a person trusts their social media platforms to keep them informed.
B) When a person has a high amount of screen time.
C) When a person enjoys consuming news.
A) When a person trusts their social media platforms to keep them informed.
“News Finds Me Perception (NFM), which refers to the belief among individuals that they will indirectly stay informed about public affairs without actively following the news, because they believe that they will be kept informed by their online social networks.“
A news organization’s article receives thousands of shares. Its editor concludes that readers trust the reporting and approve of the coverage. Does the number of shares alone support that conclusion?
A) Yes
B) No
B) No
(Readers could be sharing the article to criticize it, express distrust, or ask others to verify its claims.)
“Participation may partly reflect distrust or disapproval.”
What type of users share the most misinformation?
A) Occasional users
B) Passive users
C) Habitual users
C) Habitual users
“Ceylan and her co-authors calculated that the 15% most habitual Facebook users were responsible for 37% of the false headlines shared in the study, suggesting that a relatively small number of people can have an outsized impact on the information ecosystem.”
What percentage of respondents were passive news consumers who did not participate online?
A) 26.8%
B) 51.7%.
C) 91.1%
B) 51.7%
“Overall, just over half (51.7 per cent) of news consumers across the 11 countries are passive consumers in the sense that they do not participate in any way.”
What percentage of URLs were not clicked in public Facebook posts shared?
A) 10%
B) 35%
C) 75%
C) 75%
“75% of forwarded links in public Facebook posts containing URLs were shared without being clicked first”
Your grandma sees a news link on Facebook that leads to an article with the headline ‘[insert celebrity here] sued their bodyguard and got $500 million dollars in retribution.” She hasn’t seen any other news on Facebook relating to the article, but she assumes that the organization must have been the first to break it. She didn’t click the link, but she assumed it to be true. Should she spread the link to your friends and family or should she suppress the narrative?
A) She should spread it.
B) She should suppress it.
B) She should suppress it.
She didn’t check the news organization to make sure it was a reputable source, nor did she look at outside resources to verify the claims. By sharing the link to other family and friends, she is possibly spreading misinformation.
Which type of misinformation do habitual users share the most of?
A) The ones that go against their political beliefs.
B) The ones that align with their political beliefs.
A) The ones that go against their political beliefs.
“Habitual users will even share misinformation that goes against their political beliefs, the researchers discovered.”
Why might the number of shares be a misleading measure of a news article’s success?
A) Articles are usually shared only after payment is verified.
B) Shares are generated by bots, not human readers.
C) People may share an article because they distrust or disapprove of it.
C) People may share an article because they distrust or disapprove of it.
“For example, for journalists and news organisations, using ‘number of shares’ as a metric for judging the ‘success’ of an article may be misleading if a significant proportion of shares are motivated by low trust and surrounded by negative sentiment.”
The authority heuristic causes users to not trust which type of news source as much as others?
A) Political figures
B) Social media friends or algorithm
C) News editors
B) Social media friends or algorithm
“We found that users are likely to perceive the news recommended by news editors to be more credible, newsworthy, and less biased compared to when the news was recommended by their social media friends or an algorithm, due to the triggering of the authority heuristic.”
A student finds that people with low trust in news prefer social media and blogs. She concludes that using these sources causes people to lose trust in news. Does this study establish that conclusion?
A) Yes
B) No
B) No
The study found an association but did not establish the direction of causality. Low trust could influence source preferences, or source preferences could influence trust.
“It is, however, appropriate to be cautious about the direction of causality concerning low trust in the news media and the preference for non-mainstream news sources.”