Creators who show their sources build trust, survey finds
About one in five U.S. adults regularly gets their news from news creators on social media platforms, but it can be difficult for audiences to suss out which personalities to trust amid an avalanche of misinformation, hot takes, and polarizing content.
New research spearheaded by a team of journalists and political scientists shows that giving audiences a peek into the reporting process can help bolster their trust in the news.
Proof News, a nonprofit newsroom focused on tech accountability, in collaboration with researchers at the French university Sciences Po, shared social news videos with 2,000 U.S. adults to measure their perceptions of trustworthiness. Participants were randomly assigned one of Proof’s yet-to-be-published short-form news videos.
Some participants viewed videos with labels describing the sources, others saw videos with labels describing the newsroom’s ethical standards, and some saw videos without a label. The Sources labels appeared on cards embedded at the end of the video, like a credits reel, or were placed into the video description, the text accompanying the video.
Participants then rated the videos on various trust metrics. We found that labeling videos did increase trust — particularly a label that described the video sources in the description and, to a slightly lesser extent, a label describing newsroom standards in the credits.
This effect was particularly prominent among survey respondents who identified as Democrats or reported having high trust in science. Those groups, when shown the sourcing label in the description of a general news video, reported higher assessments of transparency and trust in the journalist.
There were fewer statistically significant increases in trust metrics with labels for text articles, but Sally Lehrman, founder of The Trust Project, said the findings were still intriguing.
“I’m excited to see the results,” Lehrman said. “Methods and references really do resonate…People are asking, where did the journalist get this information, and how can I trust it.”