The digital age is permissive in a wide variety of aspects, from distribution of content to content creation – anyone can publish and, therefore, become a source of information. These characteristics are inherent not only to the evolution and high penetration of social media outlets, but also to what is known as the democratization of information (i.e., the free flow of ideas, opinions, and knowledge). Nevertheless, within this remarkably permissive media environment, it is hard to determine which news sources are more trustworthy than others. Therefore, when evaluating the accuracy of online news media information, people have many options, among which checking the source reputation, verifying information from multiple sources, relying on fact-checkers, asking friends for help, or using their own intuition and pre-existing attitudes in order to filter new information.
News consumption behavior is often challenged by a series of factors. First, the specificity of the online media environment – people are exposed to new information inside their own filter bubbles, which act as “echo chambers”: online arenas where people are exposed to a higher extent to beliefs and opinions that are in line with their own; therefore, their pre-existing views are reinforced, while no alternative ideas are being taken into account. Within these micro-environments, people are more prone to phenomena such as selective exposure and confirmation bias. Selective exposure occurs when people choose to focus on information that is congruent with and confirms their current attitudes in order to avoid or reduce cognitive dissonance; confirmation bias suggests that people actively seek out and assign more weight or validity to information that supports their current beliefs. Second, some individual characteristics such as social media usage and dependency moderate media effects, thus influencing consumption behavior. Excessive use of social media outlets could be associated with negative effects, both on a personal and professional level.
In this context, we investigate whether or not people rely more on their pre-existing attitudes than on source reputation when judging the accuracy of news stories (i.e., dealing with news content perceived as misleading). By means of a national survey (N=1000), we investigate a possible connection between social media dependency and people’s tendency to trust their own attitudes when evaluating public information accuracy. We hypothesize that higher levels of social media dependency are associated with higher trust in pre-existing attitudes (confirmation bias effects). We expect this relationship to be moderated by the level of education, in the sense that people with lower levels of education, being less critical in their news consumption patterns, will tend to rely more on their own attitudes when evaluating information accuracy.
