A first-of-its-kind study from researchers at Michigan State University reveals that individuals who experience the most distress and impairment in daily functioning from social media use are more likely to believe fake news.

“Social media are everywhere in our daily lives, and some people display problematic, excessive use of these platforms. We found that this overuse is associated with a greater tendency to believe in and engage with misinformation,” said Dar Meshi, an associate professor and co-author of the study, which published today in the journal PLOS One and was funded by MSU’s Trifecta Initiative.

Meshi and his co-author, Maria D. Molina, both faculty members in the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, conducted an online experiment in which 189 participants, age 18 to 26, were presented with 20 news stories formatted as social media posts. Ten of the stories were real and ten were false, and the order of delivery was randomized. By assessing participants’ credibility judgment of these news posts; participants intentions to click, comment, like and share posts; and their degree of problematic social media use, Meshi and Molina found that the greater people’s symptoms of problematic social media use, the more likely they were to:

• believe fake news is true;
• interact with news posts regardless if they were real or fake; and
• want to click on fake news posts.