In Twitter We Trust: a Study of Young Voters' Trust in Election Misinformation on Twitter

Misinformation runs rampant online. Social media websites have wrestled with the responsibility of spreading this misinformation, and some sites have responded by marking misinformation to attempt to stop the spread. As the world continues to change, there is a growing need to understand how young people interact with social media and the trust that they have in news on social media. This study seeks to understand this relationship by utilizing an experimental design that shows a tweet that contains election misinformation and asks participants to report their level of trust in the information's accuracy. Participants are shown the same tweet, either tweeted from a random Twitter user, President Trump, CNN, or Fox News. This study finds that traditional news media still hold credibility in young voters' minds and that ideology significantly impacts a person's trust.