{"id":2736882,"date":"2022-05-10T09:05:09","date_gmt":"2022-05-10T13:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2736882"},"modified":"2022-05-10T09:05:09","modified_gmt":"2022-05-10T13:05:09","slug":"newsguard-credibility-labels-news-2736882-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/newsguard-credibility-labels-news-2736882-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Credibility labels don’t do much to shift news diets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credibility labels don’t shift news diets away from low-quality sources or reduce belief in widely circulated inaccurate claims among average internet users, research finds.<\/p>\n

The findings do indicate that providing an indicator of sources’ quality may improve the news diet quality of the heaviest consumers of misinformation, however.<\/p>\n

Notably, the researchers also found that a majority of people rely on credible sources of information, with two-thirds completely avoiding unreliable news sites.<\/p>\n

The study, which appears in the journal 糖心视频 Advances<\/em><\/a>, centers on credibility ratings determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.<\/p>\n

“While it’s encouraging that most of us rely on credible sources of information, there are many who turn to sites of questionable trustworthiness, which raises concerns about misperceptions people may hold,” says Kevin Aslett, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) at New York University and the lead author of the paper.<\/p>\n

“However, while our study shows that, overall, credibility ratings have no discernible effect on misperceptions or online news consumption behavior of the average user, our findings suggest that the heaviest consumers of misinformation\u2014those who rely on low-credibility sites\u2014may move toward higher-quality sources when presented with news reliability ratings.”<\/p>\n

In the study, which took place in May and June 2020, the researchers encouraged a random sample of more than 3,000 online participants to install the NewsGuard browser extension, which embeds source-level indicators of news reliability into users’ search engine results pages, social feeds, and visited URLs. Different “shield” symbols are placed in-feed to provide visual summaries of sources’ quality:<\/p>\n