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Negativity in the news sells, but is such news also perceived as more credible and shareworthy? Given that negative information is more impactful and processed more easily, a positive-negative asymmetry might also exist in news processing. This negativity bias is explored in a two-part experiment (N = 696) where respondents rated (a) multiple positive and negative news items and (b) conflicting news on perceived credibility and shareworthiness. Results reveal no straightforward patterns: Audiences only hold a negativity bias in their credibility assessment under certain conditions, and even less so when it comes to sharing news. When confronted with conflicting information, audiences do not seem to use negativity as a cue to determine which news to believe or share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When societies are struck by large-scale disruptions, biases in citizens' personal risk assessment and the spread of misinformation are often reason for concern. As a contribution, this study aims to link individuals' biased perceptions of self-other asymmetry—i.e., optimistic bias in risk assessment and third-person perception regarding undesired media influence—to different patterns of news consumption and misinformation perceptions. To study these phenomena, we distributed an online survey in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic among citizens from the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany (N = 1,912). The findings offer consistent support for bias beliefs: Compared to others, citizens from all four countries perceived themselves as less vulnerable to health and financial risk—i.e., optimistic bias—as well as the influence of misinformation—i.e., third-person perception. In a next step, we provide novel insights into how general news use can be associated with lower optimistic bias regarding perceived personal risk, while intentional exposure to issue-specific information and misinformation perceptions can relate to higher optimistic bias and third-person perceptions. These relationships were found to differ across individual countries. Overall, this study provides novel insights into how media use and perceptions relate to perceived invulnerability to potential harm, which, in turn, might impede pro-social intentions during crises surrounded by the omnipresence of misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated decision making (ADM) is increasingly prominent in our experiences with communication technologies and more broadly in our society. Understanding what drives individual perceptions of AI is crucial. This study presents the results of a survey across 10 European countries (N = 6,643), confirming trust and political attitudes as general drivers of perceptions of AI, especially in the media sector. Individuals who score higher on institutional trust are more positive about AI for news recommendations and user and content moderation. Conversely, individuals with higher media trust are more negative about AI for news (creation or recommendation). Those leaning toward the right-wing political orientation are more positive about AI for news, whereas those more distant from the political center are more negative about AI--for media-specific tasks and for society more broadly. Sociodemographics, the need for cognition, privacy concerns, and online self-efficacy are also relevant in these evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test generational differences in media trust and its antecedents, including political trust, interest, and orientation, as well as perceptions of media inaccuracy and media bias. We rely on original survey data from ten European countries, collected in 2019. We find no differences in the levels of media trust between generations, but we find that key correlates of media trust relate differently to it in different generations. For example, political interest is more strongly correlated with media trust for Millennials than for other generations. Perceptions of bias and inaccuracy have a strong negative correlation with media trust overall, but it is stronger for older generations. These results suggest, that in the long term, societal developments, and in particular debates about media bias and misinformation may impact media trust of young generations differently as they grow older—however, our data give no indication of that creating generational gaps in media trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the EU multilevel structure, citizens differ in perceptions of who is responsible for policies and their outcomes. Policy responsibility consists of two concepts, functional and causal responsibility. While the latter has been studied in the context of 'blaming Europe' for negative outcomes, the necessary condition of functional responsibility has received only scant attention. The media plays a crucial role in providing citizens with information for attributing causal responsibility, but may be even more important for attributing functional responsibility. We test this for the case of the Netherlands for four policy areas: Immigration, social welfare, economy, and terrorism. Linking survey data to automated media content data, we predict the effect of exposure to policy-related information on the European level on policy-level attribution. Although the results show both differences in citizens' functional responsibility attributions and EU-related media coverage across policy areas, we find no effect from media consumption on responsibility attributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of increasing concerns about false and deceptive information in public opinion, this research note explores which causes and sources news users associate with the dissemination of misinformation. Based on representative survey data collected in the Netherlands (N = 1,994), we found that news users distinguish unintentional causes related to uncertain evidence and lacking expert knowledge from politically or financially motivated falsehoods. People on the left-wing of the political spectrum associate falsehoods more with the radical-right, whereas those on the right-wing tend to associate misinformation with the radical-left. Right-wing participants, however, are most likely to perceive misinformation as driven by a deliberate attempt to hide reality. Our findings point to an ideological bias in information credibility that could foster polarization along epistemic lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mediating role of emotional reactions and their relevance for political attitudes and behavioral intentions has remained an understudied subject, and the extant literature has mostly overlooked the importance of political campaigning on social media in the context of the European Union (EU). Using an experimental design, we test whether political parties' (1) positive or negative EU-related (2) emotional or non-emotional political messages influence citizens' emotions toward the EU, whether these emotions affect politically relevant outcomes, and whether the effects differ for citizens with varying political ideologies. We find that positive emotions in particular affect almost all outcome variables above and beyond experimental condition and individuals' political orientation. We discuss our results in light of political marketing research and recent developments in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]