1 Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
2 Department of Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2019 Apr;22(4):283-287. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2018.0475. Epub 2019 Mar 8.
The increased reliance on social network sites for news and the proliferation of partisan news have refocused scholarly attention on how people judge credibility online. Twitter has faced scrutiny regarding their practices in assigning the "verified" status to Twitter accounts, but little work has investigated whether users apply this cue in making assessments for information quality. Using an experimental design, we test whether the Twitter verification mark contributes to perceptions of information and account credibility among news organizations. We additionally consider how account ambiguity and account congruence with political beliefs condition this relationship. Our results suggest little attention is paid to the verification mark when judging credibility, even when little other information is provided about the account or the content. Instead, account ambiguity and congruence dominate credibility assessments of news organizations. We propose that Twitter may need to revise their verification badges to increase their salience or provide more information to users. Currently, users appear to rely on other cues than the verification label when judging information quality.
人们越来越依赖社交网站获取新闻，党派新闻也日益泛滥，这使得学术研究的重点重新聚焦到人们如何在线判断可信度上。推特（Twitter）因其为推特账户分配“认证”状态的做法而受到审查，但很少有研究调查用户是否会将这一提示用于评估信息质量。我们采用实验设计，检验推特认证标记是否有助于用户对新闻机构的信息和账户可信度的认知。我们还考虑了账户的模糊性和与政治信仰的一致性如何影响这种关系。我们的研究结果表明，在判断可信度时，用户很少关注认证标记，即使没有提供关于账户或内容的其他信息。相反，账户的模糊性和一致性主导了用户对新闻机构可信度的评估。我们认为，推特可能需要修改他们的认证徽章，以增加其显著性或向用户提供更多信息。目前，用户在判断信息质量时似乎依赖于除认证标签以外的其他线索。
