Says who?: How news presentation format influences perceived believability and the engagement level of social media users

Abstract

We investigate whether the news presentation format affects the believability of a news story and the engagement level of social media users. Specifically, we test to see if highlighting the source delivering the story can nudge the users to think more critically about the truthfulness of the story that they see, and for obscure sources, whether source ratings can affect how the users evaluate the truthfulness. We also test whether the believability can influence the users’ engagement level for the presented news post (e.g., read, like, comment, and share). We find that such changes in the news presentation format indeed have significant impacts on how social media users perceive and act on news items.