GW Researcher Asks How People Assess Credibility of Social Media Clips

Authored by:

In the age of YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, media literacy has become an increasingly critical skill. Eli Gottlieb, senior fellow at the George Washington University's Graduate School of Education and Human Development, is conducting a study of how students assess the credibility of news clips and other posts on social media.

The study is based on a previous project in which Gottlieb and his associates found that people do a better job of checking facts when they work with diverse partners. That study, published in 2023, looked at how cultural identity affects the way people interpret what they find online. It involved English and French people reading tweets, some of them either complementary or derogatory of the French or the English, and then fact-checking the information.

"One tweet cited a study showing that around 50% of French people shower less than once a day," Gottlieb said. "The English loved this tweet and thought it was definitely true, but the French found it quite offensive. We put pairs of people together to fact-check and looked at what would happen if you put an English pair together, or two French people, or a mixed pair. We discovered that pairs from the same cultural background did much shallower fact-checking and basically confirmed their original conclusions. But when we put English and French together in a pair, their search was deeper and more thorough-and their opinions about the credibility of the tweet shifted in line with evidence their search revealed."

Gottlieb started to wonder if these findings would hold when it comes to really difficult controversies. He and his team harvested posts about highly contested matters of fact from a variety of social media platforms and built their own simulacrum of a platform that presents two sets of four short clips: one about the war in Ukraine, the other about the war in Gaza.

"We found clips about a specific contested event in each conflict, from individual talking heads pro one side or the other to official news sources," Gottlieb said. "We're asking people to interact with them as they would on any social media platform, where they could 'like' something, forward it or comment on it. We then ask them to rate each clip for credibility."

Participation in the study is anonymous and takes around 15 minutes. To enable GW's researchers to study how people's cultural backgrounds affect their credibility ratings, participants complete a short demographic questionnaire before viewing the clips. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of GW's Office of Human Research.

"We're looking at how long people spend looking at a video and how that relates to the credibility they give it, and how all of that relates in turn to how close or distant they see themselves as being from one or other side in a conflict. In the Israel-Gaza case, for example, we're interested in how religion affects responses. Does it make a difference if you are Jewish, Muslim, another religion or no religion? We're trying to drill down as deeply as we can into the different identity-related factors that might affect how credible you find claims you encounter on social media."

Participants are not being tested on whether they can tell true from false-the examples chosen are live controversies, historically contested and likely to remain so well into the future-and there is no score given at the end.

"We're not interested in proving people are stupid or clever about detecting fake news," Gottlieb said. "We're asking: What are the factors that lead them to assume that something is credible? How much of this is about them and what they're bringing to the table? And how much is about the type of controversy or the type of evidence that they're looking at?"

The study will add to our understanding of how people interact with social media, Gottlieb said, and give participants an opportunity to see the variety of ways in which controversies are presented and to think about what makes something seem more or less believable to them.

Do you think you can tell real from fake news? Test your media literacy skills by clicking hereand entering the code 0525. The study is accessible only via cellphone, not from tablets, laptops or desktop computers.