Credibility of digital political news in Spain: comparison between traditional media and social media

Abstract

In the context of the dissemination of fake news and the traditional media outlets’ loss of centrality, the credibility of digital news emerges as a key factor for today’s democracies. The main goal of this paper was to identify the levels of credibility that Spanish citizens assign to political news in the online environment. A national survey (n = 1669) was designed to assess how the news format affected credibility and likelihood of sharing. Four different news formats were assessed, two of them linked to traditional media (digital newspapers and digital television) and two to social media (Facebook and WhatsApp). Four experimental groups assigned a credibility score and a likelihood of sharing score to four different political news items presented in the aforementioned digital formats. The comparison between the mean credibility scores assigned to the same news item presented in different formats showed significant differences among groups, as did the likelihood of sharing the news. News items shown in a traditional media format, especially digital television, were assigned more credibility than news presented in a social media format, and participants were also more likely to share the former, revealing a more cautious attitude towards social media as a source of news.