Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA.
Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2021 Jun;24(6):384-389. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2020.0566. Epub 2021 Mar 2.
Social endorsement cues (SEC) offer information about how online users have engaged and evaluated online content. Some view that SEC thus can serve as useful heuristics when users evaluate the credibility of news content on social media. At the same time, SEC can be manipulated by a variety of commercial and political actors on social media. This study examines whether SEC influence individuals' credibility judgments of political news on social media, and how the salience of concerns that SEC can be manipulated by others can undermine the perceived credibility. Using an experiment, we found that SEC had a influence on news credibility, regardless of whether or not SEC manipulability concerns were primed. An independent effect of SEC manipulability concerns was also found, such that priming thoughts about the manipulability of SEC led participants to rate the news post as credible, regardless of whether that post included SEC. These results suggest a spillover effect whereby concerns over the manipulation of SEC can create doubt about the authenticity of other cues from the news (e.g., source and message), and lead to perceptions that news shared on social media can be manipulated more generally.
社会认可线索（SEC）提供了有关在线用户如何参与和评估在线内容的信息。一些人认为，当用户在社交媒体上评估新闻内容的可信度时，SEC 可以作为有用的启发式信息。同时，SEC 可以在社交媒体上被各种商业和政治行为者操纵。本研究考察了 SEC 是否会影响个人对社交媒体上政治新闻的可信度判断，以及 SEC 可能被他人操纵的担忧的凸显程度如何会破坏感知可信度。通过实验，我们发现，无论是否引发了 SEC 可操纵性担忧，SEC 对新闻可信度都有影响。SEC 可操纵性担忧的独立影响也存在，即引发关于 SEC 可操纵性的想法会使参与者认为新闻帖子更可信，而不管该帖子是否包含 SEC。这些结果表明存在一种溢出效应，即对 SEC 操纵的担忧会引起对新闻中其他线索（例如来源和信息）真实性的怀疑，并导致对社交媒体上分享的新闻更普遍地认为可以被操纵的看法。
