Influence of Context on Perceptions around Misinformation on social media

In recent times, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have become the main outlet for spreading news and information in various fields including politics, health care and education. The deep integration of social media in contemporary society grants us with new ways to interact with one another and exchange information. Despite these benefits, social media can be utilized by various units to spread misinformation and disinformation or ‘Fake News’ to unsuspecting social media users. Within this global misinformation crisis, the emergence of short videos as a way to convey information has revealed a greater issue in the perceptions of fake news and its dissemination. Through a study of past literature, there seems to be a gap in current work which does not examine the effect of a video’s contextual items (e.g., superimposed captions) in influencing user perceptions of the video’s truthfulness/falsity. As such, perceptions and attitudes around fake videos or false news is an area of work needed to be built upon, being a focus of this thesis. To properly examine the influence of context on perceptions of misinformation across social media, an effective investigation process must be carried out. A survey was created using Qualtrics, containing a participant information statement along with demographic questions and participant consent. The selection criteria for this study are as follows: participants must be over 18, and participants must be familiar with social media and use at least one platform on a somewhat regular basis. Participants should also have a stable internet connection which seamlessly supports HD zoom meetings. If the participant has a bad internet connection or noise interfering with the interview, the study will not continue. To select suitable participants for this study, the recruitment platform of Prolific will be utilized. 24 participants will be selected. Participants will be first required to undertake the initial Qualtrics survey in which they will answer relevant demographic questions. They will also be required to provide contact information which will be utilized in conjunction with Prolific to schedule a zoom interview. This interview will take place online via Zoom due to the current restrictions and concerns regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These interviews will be semi-structured in which participants will be exposed to true and fake videos. For the aims of this study, there will be two sets of interview groups of which participants will be randomly allocated to. Both groups will be exposed to 5 videos relating to COVID-19 or the COVID-19 vaccine, 2 of which will be fake or contain misinformation, with 3 videos being true news. However, Group 1 will be exposed to videos which contain superimposed contextual captions. Group 2 will be shown videos which do not contain the superimposed contextual captions. In this interview, participants will be told the details of the study again in which any questions or concerns can be answered. Following this, participants will be asked questions concerning their misinformation perceptions and attitudes. After a viewing of the videos, participants will be asked questions regarding the video truthfulness and again asked their attitudes/perceptions towards misinformation and fake news on SM. Audio recordings of this interview will be stored for further analysis. The entire initial survey and interview process will take 1 hour per participant. Participants will be paid with a $20 transfer for their time, which is handled by Prolific. After the conduction of the initial questionnaire and interviews, cleaning and pre-processing of the collected data and question answers will take place. We will examine the differences in video truthfulness conclusions and perceptions across the two user groups in order to see a possible impact of contextual captions on attitudes surrounding misinformation