Examining Source Effects on Perceptions of Fake News in Rural India

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Fake news on social media has led to devastating events in parts of the Global South that have seen high emergence of new social media users, who usually lack accurate mental models of digital threats and place high trust in what they access on social media. However, most research on fake news to date focuses on the Western contexts, leaving a paucity of research on the drivers of fake news in low-resource environments, particularly neglecting the viewpoints of social media users in rural regions who lag behind their urban counterparts in digital skills, literacy, and social media adoption. Much remains unknown about how rural and urban social media users differ in their engagement with fake news and how different information sources influence their trust and sharing attitudes. To fill this gap, we conducted a between-subjects design experiment with 478 people in India to investigate how rural and urban residents perceive credible and fake posts, and how different types of sources impact their perceptions of information credibility and sharing behaviors. Our findings reveal that: (1) rural residents were less adept in differentiating between credible and fake posts than urban residents, and (2) source effects on trust and sharing intent manifested differently for urban and rural social media users. For example, fake posts from family members garnered greater trust among urban social media users but were trusted the least by rural social media users. In case of sharing Facebook posts, urban users were more willing to share credible posts from celebrities, whereas, rural users were more inclined to share fake posts from journalists. Drawing on these findings, we propose design interventions to counteract fake news in low-resource environments of the Global South.