Identifying and Understanding User Reactions to Deceptive and Trusted Social News Sources

TL;DR

This study analyzes how users react differently to trusted and deceptive news sources on Twitter and Reddit, revealing platform-specific variations in reaction speed and type.

Contribution

It introduces a reaction classification model and provides large-scale analysis of user responses to news credibility on social media platforms.

Findings

Significant reaction differences on Twitter between trusted and deceptive sources.

Smaller reaction differences observed on Reddit.

Reactions vary in speed and type depending on source credibility and platform.

Abstract

In the age of social news, it is important to understand the types of reactions that are evoked from news sources with various levels of credibility. In the present work we seek to better understand how users react to trusted and deceptive news sources across two popular, and very different, social media platforms. To that end, (1) we develop a model to classify user reactions into one of nine types, such as answer, elaboration, and question, etc, and (2) we measure the speed and the type of reaction for trusted and deceptive news sources for 10.8M Twitter posts and 6.2M Reddit comments. We show that there are significant differences in the speed and the type of reactions between trusted and deceptive news sources on Twitter, but far smaller differences on Reddit.