Trust in mainstream media can help curb fake news: Study

Whether they are left- or right-leaning, laypeople trust mainstream news sources more than highly-polarised or fake news outlets, according to a study published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday.

The findings — by psychologists at the at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US and the University of Regina in Canada — are significant as many governments across the world have been trying to fight the proliferation of fake news and limit social media users’ exposure to low-quality news content.

Trust ranking

One possible intervention suggested was to use an algorithm to rank social media sites based on ‘trust’. This way, lesser content is available from sources that users deem to be untrustworthy.

“Crowdsourcing judgments of news quality means surveying non-experts (for example, social media users) about how much they trust different news sources, and then using these user trust ratings as a measure of the quality of the news sources. It is the same approach that Facebook started using from last year,” according to the researchers.

Facebook, which has been under fire from different governments for not curtailing the spread of fake news in the past, sprang into action last year. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarisation in the world today. Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them. That’s why it’s important that the News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post in January last year.

“Our research suggests that this approach of Facebook seems promising,” said David Rand, Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT Sloan and lead author of the study.

The authors found that the participants, despite their ideological leanings, found mainstream more trustworthy than hyperbolic social media sites, even if the latter was proximate to their ideology. Republicans — among the volunteers — trusted mainstream media sources often seen as left-leaning such as the New York Times more than well-known right-wing ‘hyperpartisan’ sites like Breitbart or Infowars, they said.

Important caveat

“We found that laypeople did not generally trust news outlets that they were unfamiliar with. They also did not necessarily trust outlets they were familiar with, but being familiar seemed like a necessary pre-condition for trust. Put differently, our subjects were initially sceptical of news sources, and the sources had to earn their trust,” Rand told BusinessLine .

“If social media platforms were less likely display content from sources which users gave low trust ratings, this would lead to less fake news and other kinds of misinformation,” he said. But, according to Rand, there is an important caveat to this work. “We’ve only done it with Americans. So, we do not know how well this approach would work in other countries. And it’s really important to check before implementing it elsewhere,” he said.

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