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Your favourite social media star is more influential than media organisations that have built up their audience's trust over decades, according to a recent experiment.
The study by the Media Insight Project found that people's trust in a piece of content on Facebook was stronger if they trusted the person who shared it — regardless of what organisation published it.
The researchers wanted to test the findings of an earlier survey in which people said they placed more faith in the news organisation brand than the person who shared the content.
So they built fake Facebook posts about health news from public figures like Oprah and Australian fitness guru Kayla Itsines, and showed them to almost 1,500 Americans.
All posts featured the same content, but for some people the article was attributed to the Associated Press, founded in 1846, while others were told it was written by DailyNewsReview.com, a made-up news site.
The study found that what mattered most was whether the story was posted to Facebook by someone trusted, or someone previously tagged as not trusted by the social media user.
"When people see news from a person they trust, they are more likely to think it gets the facts right, contains diverse points of view, and is well reported than if the same article is shared by someone they are sceptical of," the researchers wrote.
More people thought the article was accurate if the sharer was trusted but the article came from a fictitious news outlet (49 per cent), than if the article came from the AP but the sharer was not trusted (32 per cent).
Trust in the sharer also influenced how likely people were to engage with the author or share the article.
What does this mean for social media users?
"We now become publishers when we share. So we have a responsibility to think about that before we retweet."
The results of the experiment came as the ABC's Q&A hosted a debate on the rise of "fake news", in which strategist and researcher Claire Wardle said people were being bombarded with information from a whole variety of new and traditional sources.
"Times have changed. It used to be that we had gatekeepers; we had the ABC. [People] went to the newsagent and got their paper and paid their money. Now news comes to us via text message or email or Twitter or Facebook," she said.
"The design of it is very complicated. We don't know what is what, which is the mainstream media, which is a blogger or a friend sharing a rumour. It is very difficult to make sense of all of this.
"So as citizens of information and consumers of information, we have to learn how to be critical of the information that we consume and journalists have got an important role to play in helping audiences navigate the news ecosystem.
"But as users we have to take responsibility for checking what we are receiving and, crucially, what we share ourselves."
The study only used celebrities for the Facebook posts, so it's not clear how much the findings relate to your real-life social media feed, which is also full of your friends, family members and distant acquaintances — and which you get to curate to a certain extent by choosing who you friend and follow.
But quotes like this one from the experiment's focus group give some insight into how users view their actual feeds:
"I look who shared it. If I have a friend that's a creep I might not believe it. If a friend is in a certain field, then I might believe what they post."
What does this mean for news publishers?
Ms Wardle said the research was a wake-up call for journalists, who should think of themselves as creators of individual "atoms of content", rather than focusing on their brand.
"Create content that is shareable, do excellent journalism that will be shared — but know that this will not always be enough," she said.
The Media Insight Project had this advice for journalists, their employers, and social media networks like Facebook:
- To publishers and journalists: Your readers and followers are not just consumers to monetise, instead they may be social ambassadors whose own credibility with their friends affects your brand's reputation. It is the sharer's credibility, more than your own, which determines other people's willingness to believe you and engage with you. This underscores the importance of news organisations creating strong communities of followers who evangelise the organisation to others.
- To news-literacy advocates: In light of growing concerns about "fake news" spreading on social media, this experiment confirms that people make little distinction between known and unknown (even made-up) sources when it comes to trusting and sharing news. Even 19 per cent of people who saw our fictional news source would have been willing to recommend it to a friend.
- To Facebook and other social networks: Facebook and other social networks could do more to emphasise and provide information about the original sources for news articles. The fact that only two in 10 people in our experiment could recall the news reporting source accurately after seeing a Facebook-style post suggests that basic brand awareness has a long way to go. We found that sharers affect perceptions more than the original news reporting source — but might that change if Facebook made the reporting source label more prominent?
"The bottom line is this: a trusted sharer has more significant effects on beliefs about news than a reputable media source," said Trevor Tompson, director of The AP-NORC Centre, one of the bodies behind the poll.
"Publishers need to take this finding seriously going forward and think about their readers as ambassadors to cultivate. Social media sites should also think seriously about transparency when it comes to emphasising where news articles originate."
The American Press Institute's Tom Rosenstiel also said social media sites had a responsibility to better police what is spread on their sites.
"If you build the freeway, you have the responsibility to make sure the freeway is safe," he told AP.
"You shouldn't just say that if there are potholes, drivers should try to avoid them."
Facebook says it is making it easier for users to flag fake news stories, and it also supports media literacy efforts.
"This is an issue that cuts broadly across the social media and news industries, and we are working together to help people better understand the sources and authenticity of information before they share with their friends or family," Justin Osofsky, Facebook's vice-president of global operations and media partnerships, told AP.
"It's important we give people the tools to make smart decisions about content, with the goal of helping create more informed communities across the digital ecosystem."
The Media Insight Project poll on sharing news on social media was conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute November 9 to December 6, 2016. It is based on online and telephone interviews of 1,489 adults who are members of NORC's nationally representative AmeriSpeak panel. The survey was funded by API.
Topics: social-media, print-media, internet-culture, united-states