Does fake news lead to more engaging effects on social media? Evidence from Romania
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Nicoleta Corbu
Abstract
This study examines the potential of fake news to produce effects on social media engagement as well as the moderating role of education and government approval. We report on a 2x2x2 online experiment conducted in Romania (N=813), in which we manipulated the level of facticity of a news story, its valence, and intention to deceive. Results show that ideologically driven news with a negative valence (rather than fabricated news or other genres, such as satire and parody) have a greater virality potential. However, neither the level of education nor government approval moderate this effect. Additionally, both positive and negative ideologically driven news stories enhance the probability that people will sign a document to support the government (i. e., potential for political engagement on social media). These latter effects are moderated by government approval: Lower levels of government approval lead to less support for the government on social media, as a consequence of fake news exposure.
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Appendix: Experimental conditions (stimuli)
Control condition | Positive manipulation condition |
Negative manipulation condition | Positive fabrication condition |
Negative fabrication condition | Satire |
Parody |
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Focus on Media Policy and Strategic Communication
- Social bureaucracy? The integration of social media into government communication
- Data-driven campaigns in public sensemaking: Discursive positions, contextualization, and maneuvers in American, British, and German debates around computational politics
- Public discourse, political legitimacy, and collective identity: Cases from Iraq, Brazil and China
- The effects of five public information campaigns: The role of interpersonal communication
- Focus on Audiences
- Sensitizing the concept of mediatization for the study of social movements
- Upset with the refugee policy: Exploring the relations between policy malaise, media use, trust in news media, and issue fatigue
- Information-sharing practices on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign: An “unreliable information bubble” within the extreme right
- Pathways to political (dis-)engagement: motivations behind social media use and the role of incidental and intentional exposure modes in adolescents’ political engagement
- Does fake news lead to more engaging effects on social media? Evidence from Romania
- Focus on Media Content
- Reconsidering churnalism: How news factors in corporate press releases influence how journalists treat these press releases after initial selection
- Clouded reality: News representations of culturally close and distant ethnic outgroups
- The construction of the Arab-Islamic issue in foreign news: Spanish newspaper coverage of the Egyptian revolution
- The world’s first mainly female cabinet: “The council of female ministers” in the Spanish cabinet (2018) on Twitter
- From Wanderers to Strangers. The shifting space of Scandinavian immigration debate 1970–2016
- The 2015 refugee crisis, uncertainty and the media: Representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Austrian and French media
- Austerity and fragmentation: Dynamics of Europeanization of media discourses in Greece and Italy
- “As quiet as a mouse”: Media use in Azerbaijan