Cat pics, real news and fakery it’s all the same to many of us

In the age of fake information there is a price to pay if you get your news from the same place you find funny memes and cat pictures.

A new study published in the journal New Media & Society has highlighted the dangers of people getting their daily dose of news from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Researchers from Ohio State University in the US found that people viewing a blend of news and entertainment on a social media site tend to pay less attention to the source of content they consume, meaning they could easily mistake satire or fiction for real news.

People who viewed content that was clearly separated into categories — such as current affairs and entertainment — did not have the same issues evaluating the source and credibility of content they read.

Lead researcher George Pearson believes that people are drawn to social media sites because “they are one-stop shops for media content, updates from friends and family, and memes or cat pictures”.

“But that jumbling of content makes everything seem the same to us.

“It makes it harder for us to distinguish what we need to take seriously from that which is only entertainment.”

For the study, Pearson created a fictional social media site called “Link Me”.

The 370 participants saw four webpages with either two or four posts each.

Each post consisted of a headline and short paragraph summarising the story, as well as information on the source of the post.

The sources were designed to be either high or low credibility, based on their name and description.

For example, one high-credibility source was called “Washington Daily News” and was described as a “professional news organisation renowned for high-quality and objective journalism”.

One low-credibility source in the study was called “Hot Moon” and described as “a collective of non-professional writers”.

All posts were based on real articles or public social media posts taken from Reddit or Tumblr.

After viewing the site, participants were asked a variety of questions.

Pearson was most interested in whether they paid more attention to the posts about current affairs topics than those in other categories, such as entertainment.

“That would suggest that they were paying attention to the sources of the posts and understanding what was news and what was not,” Pearson said.

The results showed that when the content was not grouped by distinct topics — in other words, news posts appeared on the same page with entertainment posts — participants reported paying less attention to the source of the content.

“They were less likely to verify source information to ensure that it was a credible source,” he said.

That may be one reason satirical and other types of fake news get shared by people who evidently think it is real.

Pearson said one of the problems was that many social media sites presented content in the exact same way, no matter the source.