Trust in News as Moderated by Known Truth Assessments and Source
Disinformation has become a problem in various spaces, from social media to organizations. Given the lack of evidence and transparency surrounding organizational disinformation, we aim to understand issue of information exposure effect and source trust from the lens of traditional information consumption online. Using an online experiment and multi-level mixed-effects modeling, we find that the exposure effect exists even over only two exposures to a headline, as long as participants are not shown fact-checking. Fact-checking can be effective in reducing the impact of the exposure effect. Additionally, we find that participants trusted sources significantly more before seeing the headlines. The possible presence of disinformation reduces trust in sources, even when considered highly neutral and reputable. These findings can inform simulations of agent interactions with misinformation as well as future experimental designs focused on evaluations of belief and trust based on recognizability of a source.