The trustworthiness of peers and public discourse: exploring how people navigate numerical dis/misinformation on personal messaging platforms

Lawson, Brendan T., Chadwick, Andrew, Hall, Natalie-Anne and Vaccari, Cristian 2024. The trustworthiness of peers and public discourse: exploring how people navigate numerical dis/misinformation on personal messaging platforms. Information, Communication and Society 10.1080/1369118X.2024.2400141

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Abstract

Numbers are essential to how citizens understand the world, but also have distinctive power to confuse or manipulate. Numerical claims permeate online dis/misinformation, yet relatively little is known about how people engage with them. We conducted in-depth interviews (W1N = 102, W2N = 80) to explore how people gauge the trustworthiness of numbers on personal messaging platforms – highly popular yet difficult-to-research online spaces. Adopting a relational approach to informational trustworthiness, we find that numbers were not perceived as objective facts but as biased, technical, and verifiable. This spurred participants to engage in three practices to establish trustworthiness: contextualising peers’ motivations with reference to public discourse, selectively trusting peers’ competence in light of public signals of salient expertise, and using public sources to assess what peers share. These practices, which we found endured over time, suggest that norms of verification and correction on messaging platforms involve a complex integration of information from interpersonal relationships and public discourse.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	1369-118X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 October 2024
Date of Acceptance:	26 July 2024
Last Modified:	16 Oct 2024 13:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172820

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