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Credibility as a Double-Edged Sword: The Effects of Deceptive Source Misattribution on Disinformation Discernment on Personal Messaging

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posted on 2025-06-05, 09:49 authored by Cristian Vaccari, Andrew ChadwickAndrew Chadwick, Natalie-Anne Hall, Brendan LawsonBrendan Lawson

Disinformation often features reputable sources to boost false information’s credibility, but does this deceptive source misattribution shape its spread on personal messaging? In a preregistered between-subjects survey experiment on UK WhatsApp users (N=2,580), we showed participants WhatsApp messages containing true or false news attributed to either BBC News or no source. Attribution to BBC News significantly increased message credibility. Importantly, however, participants’ responses to false messages attributed to BBC News were statistically indistinguishable from their responses to true messages. On personal messaging, source credibility can boost the spread of accurate news but can also be used deceptively to propagate falsehoods.

Funding

Leverhulme Trust as part of the project ‘Understanding the Everyday Sharing of Misinformation on Private Social Media’ (RPG-2020-019)

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Published in

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

©The Author(s)

Publisher statement

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Acceptance date

2025-05-27

ISSN

1077-6990

eISSN

2161-430X

Publisher version

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Andrew Chadwick. Deposit date: 29 May 2025

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Categories

    Keywords

    Personal messagingWhatsAppExperimentSource effectsDisinformationJournalism and professional writingCommunication and media studies

    Licence

    CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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