Fake or Real? The Effects of Source, Intermediary, and Digital Media Literacy on Contextual Assessment of Image Credibility Online

• In Event: Credibility Assessments in Online Environments

Abstract

Fake or doctored images propagated through the Web and social networks can deceive, emotionally distress, or influence public opinions and actions. Yet few studies have examined how people evaluate image credibility. This paper details a large-scale online experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk that probes how people react to and evaluate image credibility in various online platforms. We ran a series of six between-subjects experiments, each of which randomly assigned participants one of 28 news-source mockups featuring a fake image, and asked participants to evaluate its credibility based on various features. We found most social and heuristic cues of online credibility, such as source trustworthiness, bandwagon, and intermediary trustworthiness had no significant impact on evaluation. Viewers’ Internet skills, photo editing experience, and social media use were significant predictors of image credibility evaluation. Viewers’ favorable attitude towards the issue depicted in the image also positively predicts their credibility rating.

Authors

• Cuihua Shen, U of California, Davis

• Mona Kasra, U of Virginia

• Wenjing Pan, School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China

• Grace Ann Benefield, UC Davis

• Yining Zhou Malloch, University of California, Davis

• James F O'Brien, UC Berkeley