What type of social media social media user are you? Mindless scroller or in-depth reader? Do you follow a few carefully selected accounts, chosen for their high-quality posts? Maybe you prefer a more varied newsfeed with posts from lots of different sources—because why wouldn’t you mix funny kitten memes, celebrity gossip, and articles about climate change? Or perhaps your online strategy revolves around following as many other users as possible in the hope that they'd follow you back. After all, this strategy could help to increase your own visibility and reach.

Whatever your approach, your interaction with online media will undoubtedly determine what type of information you’re exposed to. At the same time, it is likely to affect your personal susceptibility to misinformation or "fake news".

4 Stages of Engagement with Fake News

Falling for online fake news remains a worrying trend that can affect people's responses to socio-political challenges such as pandemics. The number of factors that influence susceptibility to fake news is large and may surprise you. To help categorise these factors and help people consider particular areas of vulnerability, psychologists have proposed a novel framework for online engagement with fake news. According to this framework, there are four separate stages of engagement: (1) source selection, (2) information selection, (3) evaluation and (4) reaction.

Source selection: The source selection stage refers to how people create their own online information environment. This might include strategies described in the introduction of this post like the decisions about the number and type of online accounts to follow. To select their sources, people typically consider information or cues that might signal overlapping interests and provide an idea of people's agendas.

Information selection: Many of us are prone to mindless scrolling of online newsfeeds. What cues then prompt us to click on a headline and explore content in more depth? In a separate stage of information selection, online news consumers make judgments about their engagement with individual pieces of information that are being shared. Factors that appear to matter include a common preference to seek out novel content and an inherent negativity bias, referring to a disproportionate interest in negative news items.

Evaluation: A considerable amount of research has focused on how individuals evaluate the online news content they encounter and engage with. This often includes nuanced considerations around quality as well as identification of information that is outright wrong. Key factors influencing this stage are individual differences in intuitive gut decision-making or emotionality. Overly intuitive or emotion -driven appraisals may render consumers more susceptible to misinformation. Additionally, illusory truth effects can play a role. These refer to several trivial factors such as simple repetition of information that can create misleading perceptions of truthfulness.

Reaction: The final stage of engagement with fake news encompasses the way individuals react to online content. This might involve "liking" content by giving a “thumbs up,” reacting through the selection of an emoji, commenting on content or simply sharing them with other people in one’s social network. Reactions are often affected by strategies around the building of an online identify or developing an online network. For example, by liking other people's content, individuals might receive a reciprocal response or simply increase their own visibility online.

So What?

The novel framework outlined above is a useful tool for interpreting and analysing people’s use of online content. It can also help to inform the design of interventions to protect online news consumers from the risk of misinformation. Considering the four stages of online news engagement could serve to identify unique behavioural footprints in the context of online news. Not every information consumer will engage in all four stages of the framework, and their approach or order of engaging in the different steps can vary. For example, individuals, who are very trusting of their carefully curated information sources, might skip the third stage of critical content evaluation. Others might frequently engage in the first three stages of the framework, but miss the fourth stage and never show any open reactions or “liking” of content.

The framework also offers helpful insights for identifying personal vulnerability to misinformation. People following many different accounts on social media are likely to be exposed to mixed-quality information, increasing susceptibility to thinking errors. Increased awareness of the need for critical information selection and attention to overly sensationalist news headings might help in this case. By contrast, individuals with a narrow selection of trusted accounts may be tempted to assume that all the content in their newsfeeds is of high quality, thereby forgoing more critical appraisals. Reminding oneself about the importance of analytical thinking and emotional detachment—even for trusted sources—are key to building resistance in those cases.

What does your engagement with fake news look like and how might you optimise your online information footprint?