Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This study explores how social media design features affect use of sources. A 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment examined effects of “information context collapse” (ICC)—where different content types are presented in the same form and location—and volume of content (VoC). These features were hypothesized to predict inattentive (System 1) processing, which predicts “source blindness”—where users fail to process source cues during news use. A mock social media site was created with participants queried about posts shown on the site. Results find that while VoC has no effect, ICC significantly predicts source blindness mediated by System 1 processing. This suggests collapsed information environments lead to inattentive processing of source information, increasing potential negative outcomes of social media news use. Implications of these findings are discussed.
Following news on social media boosts knowledge, belief accuracy and trust
Many worry that news on social media leaves people uninformed or even misinformed. Here we conducted a preregistered two-wave online field experiment in France and Germany (N = 3,395) to estimate the effect of following the news on Instagram and WhatsApp. Participants were asked to follow two accounts for 2 weeks and activate the notifications. In the treatment condition, the accounts were those of news organizations, while in the control condition they covered cooking, cinema or art. The treatment enhanced current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories and awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. The treatment had no significant effects on feelings of being informed, political efficacy, affective polarization and interest in news or politics. These results suggest that, while some forms of social media use are harmful, others are beneficial and can be leveraged to foster a well-informed society.
Changes to the Facebook Algorithm Decreased News Visibility Between 2021-2024
Platforms, especially Facebook, are primary news sources in the US. In its widely criticized "War on News," Meta algorithmically deprioritized news and political content. We use data from 40 news organizations (5,243,302 Facebook posts, 7,875,372,958 user reactions) and 21 non-news pages (396,468 posts; 1,909,088,308 reactions) between January 1, 2016 and February 13, 2025 to examine how these changes influenced news visibility on the platform. Reactions to news declined by 78% between 2021 and 2024 while reactions to non-news pages increased, indicating targeted suppression of news visibility. Low-quality sources were especially suppressed, yet the 2025 end to "War on News" increased user reactions to news, especially low-quality ones. These changes do not reflect decreased news supply, Facebook user base, or interest in news over this period.
Scrolling Past Public Health Campaigns: Information Context Collapse on Social Media and Its Effects on Tobacco Information Recall
Although traditional media usually present content separated by topic, social media feeds are usually unsorted, shifting topics from post to post, a feature called “information context collapse.” Public health groups have often failed to consider how the presentation context of their campaigns may influence message reception. This study uses a mock social media feed that presents content across six topics in a sorted or unsorted fashion to see how presentation order of content influences recall of information about a novel tobacco product. The moderating impact of topic relevance and source congruency are also tested. Results show that for some measures of recall unsorted presentation reduced recall. Impacts of source congruency and topic relevance are reduced when the content is unsorted. The application of these findings for both scholarship and digital health campaigns is discussed.
Consequences of Information Feed Integration on User Engagement and Contribution: A Natural Experiment in an Online Knowledge-Sharing Community
Many online communities that rely on effortful, voluntary content contributions offer additional content curation tools to facilitate social interactions and encourage user contributions. Any platform that offers two or more heterogeneous content types (e.g., expert knowledge and social posts) faces a choice about the presentation format: whether to display the content types separately or in an integrated information feed. We leverage a natural experiment on Zhihu, a Q&A platform that offers a social-interaction-oriented functionality called Ideas. Zhihu initially presented answers (expert knowledge content) and ideas (social posts) in two different information feeds, but the platform integrated ideas into the same information feed as answers in June 2019. We find that information feed integration significantly decreased user engagement with and contribution of both ideas and answers. We hypothesize that users decreased their engagement because the juxtaposition of incongruous types of content increased mindset switching and cognitive strain. This hypothesis is supported by an additional laboratory experiment. We also present evidence showing that contributions decreased both because of the decrease in engagement (weaker social recognition incentives) and because integration heightened concerns that posting ideas would dilute the contributor’s professional image. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for any platform that hosts heterogeneous content. History: Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang served as the senior editor and Yili (Kevin) Hong served as associate editor for this article. Funding: Z. Cao acknowledges this research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72201238, 72192823]. G. Li acknowledges this research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72102047] and Shanghai Pujiang Program [Grant 21PJC006]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0043.
Illusion of knowledge through Facebook news? Effects of snack news in a news feed on perceived knowledge, attitude strength, and willingness for discussions
Research indicates that using social network sites as a source for news increases perceived knowledge even if, objectively, people fail to acquire knowledge. This might result from the frequent repetition of topics in news posts caused by multiple news outlets posting about the same news topics and the algorithm that favors similar postings. These repeated encounters can have a positive effect on the perception of knowing more, even if actual learning hardly occurs. An experiment (N = 810, representative of German Internet users) tested these assumptions. Participants were assigned to one of four groups and received a news feed with no information, few news posts, many news posts, or a full-length news article. Results indicate that many news posts increased perceived knowledge that is not paralleled by a gain in factual knowledge. Perceived knowledge mediates effects of reading many news posts on more extreme attitudes and the willingness for discussions. Even if participants who read the news article gained factual knowledge, they did not feel more knowledgeable than participants who were exposed to a news feed containing news posts. The results emphasize the meaning of engaging with full news articles, both for learning facts and for more accurate knowledge assessments.
The Role of Media in Political Polarization| Inoculation Can Reduce the Perceived Reliability of Polarizing Social Media Content
Little research is available on psychological interventions that counter susceptibility to polarizing online content. We conducted 3 studies (n1 = 472, n2 = 193, n3 = 772) to evaluate whether psychological resistance against polarizing social media content can be conferred, using the Bad News game, a “technique-based inoculation” intervention that simulates a social media feed. We investigate (1) whether technique-based inoculation can reduce susceptibility to content designed to fuel intergroup polarization; (2) whether technique-based inoculation can offer cross-protection against misinformation techniques that people were not inoculated against; and (3) whether political ideology plays a role in how people engage with anti-misinformation interventions. In Studies 1 and 3 (but not Study 2), we found that technique-based inoculation significantly reduces the perceived reliability of polarizing content and offers partial cross-protection against untreated misinformation techniques. We found no effect for attitudinal certainty and news-sharing intentions. Finally, we report preliminary evidence that people may choose to engage with politically congruent news topics within the intervention.
The associations of social media attention, visibility, disinformation and retraction initiators with time to retraction: a Cox regression analysis
Purpose This study examines how retraction reasons, retraction initiators, journal visibility, access models and Twitter activity associate with the speed of retracting flawed scientific publications. Design/methodology/approach Using a Cox proportional hazards model, we analyzed 1,179 articles retracted in 2019–2021, including a subset of 98 papers tweeted before retraction. Findings The results reveal that higher journal impact factor and open-access status were associated with faster retractions. However, a significant negative interaction indicated that the effect of high-impact journals diminished for open-access publications. Journal-initiated retractions were slower overall, except in cases of misconduct such as co-authorship deception and plagiarism, where journals acted more quickly. Among retraction reasons, only deception in co-authoring was associated with significantly slower retractions, but this trend reversed when journals led the process. The association of social media attention with retraction speed was statistically robust, albeit modest in magnitude: each additional pre-retraction tweet was associated with a slight reduction in time to retraction. Bootstrap validation confirmed the stability of this finding. Originality/value Public scrutiny, institutional responsibility and publication visibility jointly shape the time to retraction. This study advances altmetrics discourse by positioning social media as a conditional, yet meaningful, participant in the retraction lifecycle. Beyond altmetrics, our findings highlight retractions as part of a broader network of relationships between public accountability, digital ethics and science communication, positioning them as moments of accountability shaped jointly by journals, ethical responsibilities and digital publics.
How cognitive elaboration fosters knowledge acquisition on social media—a field experiment
Abstract. Social media technologies have been criticized as ineffective sources of information because users seem to increase their subjective but not thei
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly
Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge
Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since c...
Does news help us become knowledgeable or think we are knowledgeable? Examining a linkage of traditional and social media use with political knowledge
This study examines traditional and social media news use in relation to political knowledge from the perspective of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Data from a two-wave panel survey show that social me...
The limits of social media as a source of political information during routine and crisis times across 17 countries
Recent studies on political knowledge suggest people learn little about political events and societal issues from social media. Potentially, social media are a more effective source of information ...
The Noisy Room
Only 3% of social media users post toxic content — but Americans estimate 43%. An interactive essay.
“Influencing the influencers:” a field experimental approach to promoting effective mental health communication on TikTok
A substantial body of social scientific research considers the negative mental health consequences of social media use on TikTok. Fewer, however, consider the potentially positive impact that mental health content creators (“influencers”) on TikTok can have to improve health outcomes; including the degree to which the platform exposes users to evidence-based mental health communication. Our novel, influencer-led approach remedies this shortcoming by attempting to change TikTok creator content-producing behavior via a large, within-subject field experiment (N = 105 creators with a reach of over 16.9 million viewers; N = 3465 unique videos). Our randomly-assigned field intervention exposed influencers on the platform to either (a) asynchronous digital (.pdf) toolkits, or (b) both toolkits and synchronous virtual training sessions that aimed to promote effective evidence-based mental health communication (relative to a control condition, exposed to neither intervention). We find that creators treated with our asynchronous toolkits—and, in some cases, those also attending synchronous training sessions—were significantly more likely to (i) feature evidence-based mental health content in their videos and (ii) generate video content related to mental health issues. Moderation analyses further reveal that these effects are not limited to only those creators with followings under 2 million users. Importantly, we also document large system-level effects of exposure to our interventions; such that TikTok videos featuring evidence-based content received over half a million additional views in the post-intervention period in the study’s treatment groups, while treatment group mental health content (in general) received over three million additional views. We conclude by discussing how simple, cost-effective, and influencer-led interventions like ours can be deployed at scale to influence mental health content on TikTok.
I do think this is a kind of novel problem with our current media environment - Serious people aren't good at making content, they have other things to do, but content is what drives attention. Tastemakers used to highlight the serious people but they're gone, replaced by content creators.
