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

By Stephanie Edgerly, Rachel R. Mourão, Esther Thorson, Samuel M. Tham. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2020

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In today’s media landscape, people are encouraged to verify the news and information they encounter. Using an online experiment, this study explores audience’s intent to verify a news headline by manipulating whether the headline is true or false, from a source that varies in credibility, and perceived to be congruent or incongruent with participants’ partisanship. Results show that participants exhibit a higher intent to verify when they believe the headline is true, which is predicted by perceived congruency with preexisting ideological leanings. We discuss these findings in terms of the normative limitations of audience verification.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd9028f3e02e5fdea3fede51352dd3d516e862ba

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In Sociology and Political Science

1. Sabrine Amri
2. Esma Aïmeur
3. Gilles Brassard

Citations in the corpus

• Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “Moreover, it has been widely proven (Metzger et al. 2020; Edgerly et al. 2020) that people are often motivated to support and accept information that goes with their preexisting viewpoints and beliefs, and reject information that does not fit in as well.”