The dangers of carte blanche trusts: investigating the interplay between the use of social media news, identifying misinformation, and trusting news about conspiracy beliefs

Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662521998025

Commentary

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation is being spread on social media and multiple conspiracy theories are very popular, but a national survey in the United States was conducted for three main purposes.

The first purpose is to examine the relationship between social media news consumption and conspiracy beliefs specific to COVID-19 and conspiracy beliefs in general.

Second, we investigate the impact of social media news trusts, an important moderator that has been overlooked in previous studies.

Third, we further propose a mitigation model that is moderated by the inclusion of misinformation identification.

These findings show that social media news use is associated with higher conspiracy beliefs and that trust in social media news is an important moderator of the relationship between social media news use and conspiracy beliefs.

Additionally, we show that misinformation identification moderated the relationship between social media news use and trust.