Designing Trust: Design Style, Political Ideology and Trust in “Fake” News Sites (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Disinformation Across Platforms and Contexts

Abstract

Journalism studies has dedicated renewed attention to issues of trust in recent years, as scholars have sought to diagnose and treat the supposed crisis of trust in news media (Fisher 2018; Moran 2020). Assessments of the trustworthiness and the credibility of news outlets necessarily implicate visual design. The design of the newspaper, for instance, has been a hallmark of its credibility; a newspaper looks trustworthy (Barnhurst 1994; Barnhurst and Nerone 2001). But the relationship between design and trust is more complicated in a digital era (Robertson and Mourão 2020). Agents of mis- and dis-information can—and frequently do—produce “fake” news outlets that look trustworthy, appropriating the design qualities of credible news outlets to advance their own information agendas (Tandoc Jr. et al. 2017).

The staying power of this “fake news” is determined by its believability. Audiences rely on credibility markers as heuristics for whether news outlets are trustworthy. The most accessible and most immediately processed of these heuristics is the “look” of the website, which viewers quickly categorize as “real” looking or “fake” looking (Robins and Holmes 2008). While a nascent literature in political communication has identified design as an important marker of credibility in this way (Billard 2016, 2018; Haenschen and Tamul 2020), there remains a dearth of research on exactly how design confers credibility and, in doing so, bolsters trust.

This article brings together literature on trust in journalism, political aesthetics, and pragmatist semiotics to analyze how fake news outlets seek to achieve trust. Drawing on Skaggs’ (2017) semiotic theory for graphic design, we conduct a visual analysis of a sample of both mainstream and “fake” news websites, identifying how “fake” news websites employ specific design elements in patterned ways that simultaneously (1) establish themselves as legitimate claimants to the label of “news outlet” and (2) differentiate themselves as outlets that can be depended upon to provide a certain class of political information that falls outside the mainstream. We argue that the news website is best understood as a design genre, within which there can be variations in design style (achieved by the arrangement of individual design elements into recognizable political motifs). To achieve credibility, fake news outlets must conform to the genre expectations of news websites. Beyond this, fake news websites must also employ design elements in ways that convey political ideology through style. Thus, for audiences who share the ideological biases of the fake news outlet, the website’s design style will convey trustworthiness. But for audiences who do not share the ideological biases of the outlet the design style will convey untrustworthiness. As such, the role of design in establishing trust in fake news outlets is both deeper and more nuanced than simply copying the website designs of mainstream news outlets.

We conclude our article by discussing the implications of our findings for the growing literature on the relationship between design and politics. We also discuss the significance of bridging semiotic analysis and sociological understandings of meaning-making, and of bridging visual analysis and sociotechnical understandings of design.

References
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Authors

• Rachel Elizabeth Moran, University of Washington

• Thomas J Billard, Northwestern University