Mainstream News in Your Feed Sharpens Fact-Checking Skills
Quick Summary
- A two-week field experiment with 3,395 Instagram and WhatsApp users shows that simply following a few reputable news outlets boosts knowledge, trust, and the ability to tell true stories from fakes online.
Professor Magdalena Wojcieszak and colleagues report in Nature Human Behaviour that encouraging social-media users in France and Germany to add just two mainstream news accounts to their feeds made them noticeably better at spotting misinformation, more aware of current events, and more trusting of journalism; all without reducing their time on the platforms. Read the College of Letters & Science Magazine story for an overview of the project, and dive into the open-access research article in Nature Human Behaviour for full details on the methods and results.