Fuelling a Distrustful News Audience? The Effect of Facebook on Peoples’ Perceptions of News

The way people consume news is changing, and changing fast. More and more people, young in particular, turn to social media to get their daily news updates. Still, we know rather little about how this development affects peoples’ perceptions of news stories. In this paper we report on an experiment designed to investigate to what extent the distribution of a news story in social media (Facebook) influence how interesting, trustful, and politically biased people consider the news story. The experiment was embedded in round II of the 2017 Norwegian Election Campaign Panel Survey (NECPS): a control group was exposed to a news story on the website of the original source, while treatment groups were exposed to the same news story distributed on Facebook. We find that Facebook distribution affects peoples’ perceptions of the news on all three factors. When the news story is shared by a party politician, the effects are even stronger. In the context of fake news, the results are reassuring as people are less trustful of anything they read on social media, even when the original source is visible. For future trust in the news media, the results are less reassuring.