Short but Critical?: How “Fake News” and “Anti-Elitist” Media Attacks Undermine Perceived Message Credibility on Social Media

Autor(en)

Sophie Lecheler, Linda Bos, Jana Egelhofer

Abstrakt

Citizens increasingly turn to social media for information, where they often rely on cues to judge the credibility of news messages. In these environments, populist politicians use “fake news” and “anti-elitist” attacks to undermine the credibility of news messages. This article argues that to truly understand the impact of these criticism cues, one must simultaneously consider additional contextual cues as well as individual-level moderators. In a factorial survey, we exposed 715 respondents to tweets by a politician retweeting and discrediting a news message of which topic and source varied. We find that both the fake news cue and the anti-elitist cue have limited across-the-board effects but decrease credibility if the message is incongruent with voters’ issue positions. Our results thus offer a more optimistic view on the power of populist media criticism cues and suggest that source and confirmation heuristics are (still) stronger influences on citizens’ credibility evaluations.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

Externe Organisation(en)

University of Amsterdam (UvA), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Journal

Communication Research (CR)

Band

50

Seiten

695-719

Anzahl der Seiten

25

ISSN

0093-6502

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231178432

Publikationsdatum

06-2023

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

508020 Politische Kommunikation

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Communication, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/short-but-critical-how-fake-news-and-antielitist-media-attacks-undermine-perceived-message-credibility-on-social-media(527cd5e1-8a9c-4bac-8fcb-e532a1303717).html