Demographic factors and trust in different news sources.

Autor: Verma, Nitin1 nitin.verma@utexas.edu, Fleischmann, Kenneth R.1 kfleisch@ischool.utexas.edu, Koltai, Kolina S.1 koltai@utexas.edu
Předmět:
Zdroj: Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology. 2018, Vol. 55 Issue 1, p524-533. 10p.
Abstrakt: What factors influence trust in different news sources? The goal of this study is to examine the role of various demographic factors: gender, age, educational attainment, political leaning, and frequency of social media use. This paper reports relevant results from a crowdsourced experimental study focusing on reporting of science news online. Significant findings include that conservatives place higher trust in fake news than moderates (p < 0.05), liberals place higher trust in mainstream media than moderates (p < 0.05), liberals place higher trust in scientific journals than conservatives (p < 0.01) and moderates (p < 0.05), and less frequent users of social media place higher trust in fake news than do more frequent users of social media (p < 0.05). Based on these results, political leaning and frequency of social media use influence trust in fake news, while political leaning also influences trust in mainstream media and scientific journals. These findings shed new light on the important issue of trust in news sources, illustrating the importance of considering political leaning and frequency of social media use in assessing trust in different news sources. These results further underscore the current degree of polarization present in the American public's perceptions of different online science news sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Databáze: Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts
Externí odkaz:
Nepřihlášeným uživatelům se plný text nezobrazuje