Why do so few people share fake news? It hurts their reputation

Why do so few people share fake news? It hurts their reputation. Sacha Altay, Anne-Sophie Hacquin, Hugo Mercier. New Media & Society, November 24, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820969893

Abstract: In spite of the attractiveness of fake news stories, most people are reluctant to share them. Why? Four pre-registered experiments (N = 3,656) suggest that sharing fake news hurt one’s reputation in a way that is difficult to fix, even for politically congruent fake news. The decrease in trust a source (media outlet or individual) suffers when sharing one fake news story against a background of real news is larger than the increase in trust a source enjoys when sharing one real news story against a background of fake news. A comparison with real-world media outlets showed that only sources sharing no fake news at all had similar trust ratings to mainstream media. Finally, we found that the majority of people declare they would have to be paid to share fake news, even when the news is politically congruent, and more so when their reputation is at stake.

Keywords: Communication, fake news, misinformation, political bias, reputation, social media, source, trust

Check also It happened to a friend of a friend: inaccurate source reporting in rumour diffusion. Sacha Altay, Nicolas Claidière and Hugo Mercier. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 22020, e49, November 2020. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2020/11/plausible-deniability-people-often.html