Contrary to popular fears, social media news consumption can make users more knowledgeable and trusting if they follow the right sources. Here’s how just two accounts can make a difference.
Study: Following news on social media boosts knowledge, belief accuracy and trust. Image credit: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
A study published in Nature Human Behaviour reports that following news on social media may not always have harmful consequences; rather, it can improve users' knowledge, belief accuracy, and trust. The study was led by researchers at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and the University of California, USA.
Background
Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with more than 60% of the global population using it for communication and information access. Despite being a vast source of information, experts have criticized social media for spreading low-quality and often false information that can potentially mislead its users.
The spreading of false information is faster on some social media platforms, where algorithms recommend entertainment over news and public affairs, highlight outrage, and display content demeaning to political opponents. These factors can contribute to greater polarization, radicalization, and confusion caused by misinformation and disinformation among users.
Several interventions have been developed to counter these factors, focusing primarily on minimizing false content on platforms and encouraging users to fact-check and rely on verified information. However, these interventions may have unintended consequences on the user’s perception of ‘good’ content and can only be implemented by or in collaboration with social media platforms.
In the current study, researchers adopted a different approach to increasing users’ exposure to good or verified content rather than minimizing false or harmful content.
The study
The researchers conducted an online field experiment on more than 3,000 social media users in France and Germany, who received an incentive to follow politically balanced news outlets on Instagram and WhatsApp for two weeks.
The participants were randomly assigned to the treatment group and the control group. The treatment group participants were asked to follow two news accounts while the control group participants followed non-news accounts covering cooking, cinema, or art.
The study's primary aim was to examine the effect of following social media news on four crucial outcomes, including current affairs knowledge, awareness of circulating true and false claims, belief accuracy, and trust in news media organizations.
Notably, the randomized design enabled researchers to draw causal inferences about the effects of following news on these outcomes.
Key findings
The study findings revealed that following news on social media platforms led to a small but statistically significant increase in current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to distinguish between true and false news stories, awareness of true news, and trust in news, journalists, and the news organizations followed.
The researchers believed that these effects are due to participants' increased exposure to news content and the probability of learning from this content. These factors might have helped participants update their perceptions and build trust in news, journalists, and news organizations.
Daily social media use comes with many distractions that are potentially more interesting and eye-catching than news content. In the treatment group, participants were not required to follow the news. Instead, they were asked to follow only two news accounts for two weeks. During this time, they still had full access to the many other appealing and attention-grabbing distractions that social media can typically offer, such as entertainment content, personal updates, and viral trends.
Despite such a short window of exposure, the social media news channels managed to produce measurable beneficial effects among participants. Notably, the study did not find any significant effect of social media news on feelings of being informed, interest in news and politics, political efficacy, or feelings toward specific political parties or political events, highlighting that attitudes are very resistant to change.
By analyzing participants’ comments, the study found that some users were largely unaware of the free and easy accessibility to news organizations on Instagram and WhatsApp. About 51% of participants expressed a willingness to continue following these news channels even after the study was completed. These observations collectively suggest that the user’s unawareness about the availability of verified social media news channels may partly contribute to the low news consumption on social media.
The researchers also used compliance measures, such as self-reported data and uploaded screenshots, to verify whether participants followed the news accounts and activated notifications. These additional checks confirmed that most participants in the treatment groups complied with the study instructions.
Importantly, the study found that participants who enabled notifications for the news accounts showed greater improvements, suggesting that notifications may play a key role in enhancing exposure and engagement.
Study significance
The study highlights the small but significant beneficial effects of following news content on social media platforms in terms of boosting knowledge, belief accuracy, and trust. The core findings suggest that improving exposure to verified information from news media could be a promising alternative to minimizing exposure to low-quality information from junk news.
The observed benefits may be explained through cognitive processing theories. People mostly receive short-form news with concise, visual elements on social media platforms, which may enhance information retention by reducing cognitive overload. Furthermore, the interactive features of these platforms could foster deeper engagement.
Many social media platforms, including Facebook, are currently downranking news channels, claiming that users are not interested in news and that news is ‘highly substitutable.’ The current study findings, however, suggest a potential demand for free and reliable news on social media platforms.
However, the authors caution that the results may not generalize to all platforms or countries and that more research is needed on the longer-term effects and different social media contexts.
Overall, the optimistic evidence provided by this study highlights the need for future research on social media platforms with different features or uses to examine the generalizability of the current findings. The study also supports using social media as a potential tool to foster a well-informed society.
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