Trust in news stories on Facebook depends more on who they’re shared by, not who wrote them – study

‘Social media users are becoming increasingly skeptical about news outlets, and now decide whether to believe a story based on whether a person they trust has shared it, not where it came from, says a landmark US study.
“The experimental results show that people who see an article from a trusted sharer, but one written by an unknown media source, have much more trust in the information than people who see the same article from a reputable media source shared by a person they do not trust,” write the authors of the research, conducted by the Media Insight Project.
For the experiment, the authors took a real news article about diabetes, and placed it in a simulated Facebook feed in front of 1,489 adult Americans. But while the text was the same for all participants, several things were different.’
Read more: Trust in news stories on Facebook depends more on who they’re shared by, not who wrote them – study