“To be honest, we weren’t that surprised, because we had fully thought out our hypotheses and what we expected to find, we indeed found,” Michigan State University associate professor Dar Meshi told WWJ’s Jeremy Jenkins of the results of his recent study.
Those results showed that people who tended to have higher rates of problematic social media were more likely to believe fake news. Meshi worked on the research with Maria D. Molina, another MSU faculty member.
“We adopted a task, a fake news task, where basically you see a news post and you judge it on its credibility and the likelihood that you’re going to interact with it,” Meshi explained to WWJ’s Jeremy Jenkins.
Overall, 189 participants age 18 to 26 were presented with 20 of these news stories formatted as social media posts. Half of the posts were real articles from outlets such as The New York Times, CNN and the BBC and the other half were fake news stories from the website Snopes. Meshi said they avoided political news and stories with a negative slant.
Participants were also surveyed for their problematic social media use. Although problematic social media use isn’t considered an official diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association, Meshi said it is similar to an addiction, conceptually.
“Typically, my work focuses on decision-making and problematic social media use,” he said. “[In] the field of addictive disorders, decision-making is a common focus of research because people with these disorders are making decisions to consume a drug or engage in a behavior. And very often, they’re having negative outcomes.”
Previously, his research has shown that problematic social media use is linked to risky and impulsive decision making. Meshi and Molina wanted to see if it was also linked to perception of news and the ability to discern between real and fake news.
“We give a survey with six items and each of these items has to do with a component of addiction, such as withdrawal or relapse. And then we tallied up the problematic social media use scores and we related them to people’s belief in the news articles and their intention to interact with the news articles, and we found that the greater someone’s problematic social media use, the greater their belief that fake news was in fact real or credible.”
As for why problematic social media use is tied to issues identifying fake news, Meshi said it might ne related to impulsivity.
“Most of the time, what we’re going after when we’re engaging on social media are social rewards,” he explained. “And it could be that some people are just after social rewards, and so they’re not really evaluating the veracity of the content as much as trying to get like uh more likes.”
Along these lines, Meshi’s tip for being a more responsible steward of information on the internet is to not rush to post – or rush to believe everything you read.
“If you know that you are one of these people that is using social media excessively, I would just try to slow down and really evaluate the source, evaluate the realistic nature of what the post is about. And especially ask yourself why you would be potentially liking it or reposting it,” he said.