Political knowledge is key to participation and decreases the risk of making inaccurate political choices. The availability of limitless amounts of information on the World Wide Web reduces the costs associated to gathering knowledge, which in turn can provide an incentive to participate. However, online-based information takes the most diverse shapes, depending on the source and hosting platform: from credible news producers to unverifiable information posted by individuals simply voicing their own opinions. By means of online experiments, we explore whether the role of source credibility is pivotal in shaping individuals’ learning process. We avail of a large sample of Internet users from Belgium, which allows us to explore the extent to which citizens are more likely to retain information from the digital version of traditional sources than from online-only sources. This study brings new insights on how different platforms affect cognition and learning processes.
