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Cynical voices online cut trust in journalism – Futurity
Excerpt:
In a new study, researchers found that real-life and online social interactions can strongly influence a person’s trust in newspaper, TV, and online journalism—but when it comes to online interactions, cynical views are the most influential.
The study surveyed 350 students at a group of residential living-learning centers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, in which students with similar academic disciplines live in the same dorms and take classes together, thus forming strong social connections.
Over the course of a semester, the researchers found that the strongest social influences on a student’s trust in news media come from face-to-face interactions with politically like-minded people. But social media interactions with online contacts were different. Online contacts who distrusted the news media, and not those who had high levels of trust in traditional news media, strongly influenced students’ views.
“With face-to-face interaction we can choose our conversation partners, but we receive their views without artificial filters and might be swayed by either positive or negative views. But on social media, we can selectively pay attention to some of the stories shared with us and ignore others. People have a known negativity bias, and that makes it more likely that we will notice more the cynical and disparaging posts,” says study author Katherine Ognyanova, an assistant professor of communication at Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s School of Communication and Information.
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