The Effects of News Curation by Political Actors on News Perceptions

I got to the next session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference a little late, so I missed Christina Monzer’s presentation – I’ll start instead with Willem Buyens. His interest is in news on social media: social media remain a critical space of news consumption and engagement, and the dissemination of news here is also governed by the social media logics that affect news curation here.

Political actors also act as news curators on social media, and in doing so make specific news selection decisions; how audiences engage with the news shared by political actors then also depends on their attitudes towards the sharers. Do these affect users’ perceptions of the news items, then? The present project explored this in Flanders, through a representative survey and an online experiment.

The results showed that if participants were shown news shared by a party leader they were likely to vote for, this did not affect news credibility; if they saw news shared by an opposing party leader, this severely undermined their perception of credibility. This was similar for news items from both mainstream and alternative news outlets.

What remains unanswered is whether this affects actually news consumption decisions, through – perceptions of lower credibility may not necessarily result in selective avoidance. Similarly, do perceptions of news item credibility also affect perceptions of the news outlets?