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Relationship between media trust and fact-checking behavior through mediation role of media usage
Date Issued
2024
Citation
Lee, K. L., Ramazon, O., & Danielson, R. W. (10 Aug 2024). Relationship between media trust and fact-checking behavior through mediation role of media usage. Annual Conference of American Psychological Association (APA) 2024, Virtual.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Health-related misinformation on social media has become a pervasive trend (Primig, 2022) and can be dangerous to mental and physical health (Lee & Ramazan, 2021). One common way to mitigate negative effects of misinformation is to deploy fact-checking behaviors (Lee & Shin, 2019). However, perceiving media messages as credible leads to less frequent fact-checking behavior (Kožuh & Čakš, 2023). While these trends with political information were investigated (e.g., Gong et al., 2022), we sought to investigate the relationship between media trust, media usage, and fact-checking behaviors on health-related information. 476 individuals were recruited from a social media platform. All study materials [fact-checking behavior (alpha = 0.83), media trust (alpha = 0.80), and media usage (alpha = 0.57)] were housed on Qualtrics. All data was analyzed using a mediation analysis with Model 4 (Hayes, 2013) with 10000 bias-corrected bootstraps. We found a significantly positive correlation between media trust and both fact-checking behavior (r = 0.26, p < 0.01) and media usage (r = 0.21, p < 0.01). Mediation analysis revealed more frequent media usage was significantly related to higher media trust (β = 0.19, p < 0.001; R^2 = 0.05, p < 0.001). In full model (R^2 = 0.08, p < 0.001), higher media trust was associated with less frequent fact-checking behavior (β = -0.09, p < 0.05) while more frequent media usage was related to more frequent fact-checking behavior (β = 0.33, p < 0.001). Indirect effect was significant (β = 0.06, p < 0.05) indicating that with indirect effect of media usage, individuals with higher media trust and higher media usage tended to fact-check more frequently. The present study sheds light on deleterious consequences of habitual media usage in context of health information consumption. As such, individuals with higher media trust should also be persuaded to fact-check as frequently.
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