Vietnamese college students’ evaluation of covid 19 fake news on social media and its effects on their behaviors = infodemic cách sinh viên việt nam Đánh giá tin giả về covid 19 trên mạng xã hội và Ảnh hưởng của tin giả tới hành vi của họ
Introduction
During the times of COVID-19, the world is battling not only a health epidemic but also an information epidemic, or an infodemic, says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2020)
An infodemic is defined as an excess of information and the rapid dissemination of misleading or fabricated news, images, and videos (World Health Organization,
2020) These fake news stories can have serious social and health implications such as undermining guidelines on social distancing or encouraging readers to self-medicate with unsanctioned treatments (O’Connor & Murphy, 2020) Therefore, in an attempt to combat the infodemic, an enormous amount of Covid-19-related misinformation and disinformation has been collected and analyzed since the onset of this global pandemic (e.g., Cheng et al., 2021; Cui & Lee, 2020; Kim et al., 2021; Shapiro et al., 2020)
Fake news about COVID-19 is as dangerous as the disease, but it spreads more easily and quickly (World Health Organization, 2020) The rapid dissemination of fake news has been said to be stimulated by social media platforms (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Tandoc, 2019) This can be traced back to the fact that social networking sites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter allow information to be circulated at ease (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Tandoc, 2019) In Vietnam, for example, there were 654 pieces of fake news being shared online from the onset of the global pandemic to mid-March 2020 (Danh Trong, 2020)
Apart from the easy circulation of information on social media, the ubiquity of social media platforms also raises concerns about the spread of fake news (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) By January 2021, there had been 72 million social media users in
Vietnam, which was equivalent to 73.7% of the country’s population at that time (We are Social & Hootsuite, 2021) The three most popular social media platforms in Vietnam were Facebook, Youtube, and Zalo, which were used by 96%, 82%, and 80% of participants, respectively (Decision Lab, 2020) Social media users are found to share fake news and misinformation (Barthel et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2015; Vosoughi et al., 2018), which directly contributes to the distribution of fake news For example, in the study conducted by Chen et al (2015), 67.8% of 171 respondents reported that they had shared misinformation online on social media Vosoughi et al (2018) even suggested that “false news spreads farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth because humans, not
2 robots, are more likely to spread it” (p 5) With social media users playing a role in the distribution of fake news, it is understandable that the prevalence of social media platforms can raise concerns about the dissemination of fake news
With social media being considered “the spaces for falsehoods” (Tandoc, 2019, p
4) and with the popularity of social media platforms, Vietnamese college students are likely to get exposed to fake news online In the study conducted by Decision Lab (2020), Facebook was the most popular news source for Vietnamese social media users, especially those aged from 15 to 23 years old In other words, the Vietnamese college-age population was found to rely more heavily on Facebook for news Given the potential social and health implications of fake news as mentioned above, Vietnamese college students’ ability to assess the credibility and trustworthiness of the information that they see online is crucial This ability is of special importance in cases when the information is expected to make a change in readers’ behaviors For example, in the context of COVID-19, if a college student encounters a news article claiming that daily vitamin D supplements could cure COVID-19, it is important for this student to evaluate the quality of the article and decide whether to take vitamin D supplements on a daily basis or not
Given the importance of this ability, it is not surprising that a large body of literature has focused on people’s ability to evaluate and identify fake news (e.g., Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Bago et al., 2019; Bronstein et al., 2019; Leeder, 2019; Metzger et al., 2015; Pehlivanoglu et al., 2021; Pennycook & Rand, 2019; Preston et al., 2021) However, these studies focus mainly on Americans only, with little attention paid to people from other countries Furthermore, most of these papers studied people’s ability to discern fake news and true news using headlines only Apart from the widespread assumption that fake news has a negative impact (Greene & Murphy, 2021; Tandoc, 2019), little work has been done to explore the effect of exposure to fake news on people’s behaviors (Greene & Murphy, 2021)
This study aims to address these gaps in the literature by investigating Vietnamese college students’ information-seeking behaviors around evaluating full-length news articles on social media platforms, specifically Facebook Behaviors associated with participants’ correct evaluation of full-length news articles online are also subject to investigation Another purpose of this study is to explore any link between participants’ perceived truthfulness of the information and their intentions to perform health-related behaviors
3 suggested by these articles Therefore, this study attempts to answer the following questions:
Research question 1: What information-seeking behaviors are performed when Vietnamese college students evaluate news articles?
Research question 2: What information-seeking behaviors are associated with Vietnamese college students' ability to correctly evaluate the trustworthiness and credibility of online news?
Research question 3: How do their evaluations relate to their intentions of behaving accordingly?
In order to answer these questions, the researcher employed the concurrent think- aloud method to study four Vietnamese college students’ information-seeking behaviors while evaluating three online articles This qualitative method was used because it requires participants to report what they are going through while engaging in a task (Ericsson & Simon, 1993) Hence, it helps the researcher to gain insights into participants’ information- seeking behaviors
This study contributes to the literature in both theoretical and practical ways
Regarding the theoretical implication, this research sheds light on the specific information- seeking behaviors Vietnamese college students deployed to discern true news and fake news This research also adds to the literature on reasoning by showing how findings from this study were consistent with previous studies which found that analytic thinking style was associated with people’s ability to correctly evaluate online information (e.g., Bago et al., 2019; Bronstein et al., 2019; Pehlivanoglu et al., 2021; Pennycook & Rand, 2019) From a practical perspective, this study provides evidence supporting the educational effort to promote college students’ use of critical evaluation skills when evaluating information online
The remainder of this study is organized as follows In Chapter 2, the theoretical background and previous studies on the research problem investigated in this study are presented An account of the methodology employed to study the research problem is provided in Chapter 3 Chapter 4 is about the findings of this study and the discussion Finally, chapter 5 concludes this thesis by summarizing the main findings, discussing some contributions, outlining several limitations, and suggesting possible directions for future research
Literature Review
Definition of Fake News
Fake news is not a new term, but there has been no consensus on defining it yet (Shu et al., 2017) Some research has defined fake news based on two key features: the facticity of information, and the intention (e.g., Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Lazer et al., 2018; Tandoc, 2019) Allcott and Gentzkow (2017, p 213), for example, defined fake news as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” Similarly, Lazer et al (2018, p 1094) defined the term as “fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent” Apart from the two key features, these definitions also share another common ground: fake news attempts to appropriate the news format On the other hand, a broader definition of fake news focuses on only the facticity of information as Zhou and Zafarani (2020) defined:
“Fake news is false news” (p 109) In their definition, news can be in various forms, including articles, speeches, posts, and statements In this paper, we follow Tandoc (2019) who defined fake news as: “It is false, it is intended to deceive people, and it does so by trying to look like real news” (p 2).
Social Media and Fake News
Social media usage is identified as one of the main factors leading to infodemics (Pian et al., 2021) Indeed, social media platforms have become “spaces for falsehood” since they enable the dissemination of fake news at ease (Tandoc, 2019, p 4) For example, social media was found to account for spreading 50.5% of the fake stories identified during the first three months of the year 2020 (Naeem et al., 2020) Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are also found to contain a disproportionate amount of misinformation (Li et al., 2020; Kouzy et al., 2020)
On social media platforms, information can be rapidly circulated among users without processes such as fact-checking or editorial judgment (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) which are carried out to evaluate the credibility and trustworthiness of information by editors and journalists (Leeder, 2019; Wineburg et al., 2016) Credibility refers to the believability of information and sources as evaluated by information receivers (Fogg,
2003) Trustworthiness is considered a key dimension of credibility perception, referring to the perceived goodness of the source in terms of truthfulness, fairness, and objectivity
(Fogg, 2003) Although social media platforms have taken steps to decrease the spread of fake news by attaching warnings to content that has been found to be false by professional fact-checkers, there are still reasons to be “cautious about the sufficiency of professional fact-checking” (Pennycook & Rand, 2021, p 396) The most important reason is that it typically takes a substantial amount of time and effort to investigate if a particular claim is false or misleading (Pennycook & Rand, 2021) Therefore, Pennycook and Rand (2021) stated that “many (if not most) false claims never get fact-checked” (p 396) Hence, it is now the social media users who are responsible for verification and fact-checking duties when they encounter information online (Wineburg et al., 2016)
Critical information evaluation skills can help when it comes to mitigating the effects of fake news (Cooke, 2017) These skills are essential in the context of COVID-19 when the proliferation of misinformation can have adverse social and health implications (World Health Organization, 2020), irrespective of borders In the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, seven hundred people have died after drinking methanol alcohol, which social media messages said to be the remedy for the treatment of COVID-19 (World Health Organization, 2020) Another example is rumors of impending food scarcity as measures to curtail transmission of COVID-19, resulting in stockpiling of food and other goods, which in turn led to shortages of some items in stores (World Health Organization,
Evaluating the credibility of information, regardless of being online or offline, is an integral competency of both media and digital information literacy (Hobbs, 2010) In her report, Hobbs (2010) defined media and digital information literacy as a constellation of life skills that were necessary for people to fully participate in the media-saturated and information-rich society Her definition of media and digital information literacy is different from that of media literacy proposed by Aufderheide (1993): “The ability of a citizen to assess, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (p
6) It also differs from the definition of information literacy given by the Association of College and Research Libraries (2000), which is a set of abilities that require people to recognize the need for information and to be able to locate, evaluate and use the needed information effectively Despite these differences, they all share a common ground: evaluating the information is one of the important components of media and digital information literacy
Most digital information literacy training programs involve instructing explicitly the critical evaluation of online sources and messages (Metzger et al., 2015) It has been found that exposure to information literacy instruction was positively associated with information evaluation skills (Hoffmann & LaBonte, 2012; Leeder & Shah; 2016; Walton
& Hepworth, 2011) For example, in a 2016 study conducted by Leeder and Shah, 27 participants were divided into two groups: the treatment condition group and the control condition group While participants in the first group were presented with prompts regarding the criteria to use when evaluating the quality of the information sources before they conducted their own search, such prompts were not given to the control condition group Results showed that the treatment condition group performed better than their control counterpart on most measurers of search behaviors.
Information-Seeking Behaviors
Information-seeking behavior refers to the purposive seeking for information as a result of a need to satisfy a goal (Wilson, 2000), and it can be seen as a facet of information literacy (Timmers & Glas, 2010) This topic has attracted great attention from researchers with many theoretical models being developed to describe and predict the human behaviors involved in the information search tasks since the early 1990s (Dinet et al., 2012) An example of those models is the Information Problem-Solving on the Internet (IPS-I) model developed by Brand-Gruwel, which focuses on the mental process involved during the information search process (Dinet et al., 2012)
The Information Problem-Solving on the Internet model developed by Brand- Gruwel et al (2005) has five steps and four regulation activities The five steps include defining an information problem, searching information, scanning information, processing information, and organizing information Four regulation activities are orientation, monitoring, steering, and evaluating, all of which are carried out constantly throughout the entire information problem-solving process Moreover, Brand-Gruwel et al (2005) also reported that skills such as reading, evaluating, and computer skills play a determining role in the entire process
Apart from developing theoretical models, several researchers in this field also developed instruments to measure people’s information-seeking behaviors (e.g,
Kurbanoglu et al., 2006, Monoi et al., 2005; Norman & Skinner, 2006; Timmers & Glas, 2010; Van Kampen, 2004) The instrument developed by Timmers and Glas (2010) to
7 measure undergraduates’ information-seeking behaviors during study assignments is one of them Timmers & Glas (2010) believed that information-seeking behavior was one facet of information literacy Therefore, they proposed that frameworks providing descriptions of information literacy in higher education can be used to determine undergraduates’ desired information-seeking behaviors An example of such a framework is the
“Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education” developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries Based on this framework, Timmers and Glas (2010) identified six components related to information-seeking behaviors desired of undergraduates: Defining information problems, using sources, applying search strategies, evaluating information, referring to information, and regulating activities.
Previous Studies on Fake News Evaluation and Identification
Research into fake news has proliferated recently and so far has emphasized some general themes, with factors affecting belief in and sharing of fake news (such as cognitive ones) being one of them (Beauvais, 2022; Greene & Murphy, 2021; Tandoc, 2019)
Familiarity is one of the cognitive factors that lead individuals to believe in fake news, even though the content of fake news is often quite implausible (Pennycook & Rand,
2019) For example, during WWII, people were more likely to believe wartime rumors that they had previously heard of (Allport & Lepkin, 1945) Familiarity can be achieved through prior exposures, and the influence of prior exposure on judgments of truth, or the illusory truth effect, has been well documented (Pennycook & Rand, 2021) Several studies have found that repetition of statements increases the perceived accuracy of these statements (e.g., Dechene et al., 2010; Fazio et al., 2015; Fazio et al., 2019; Hasher et al.,
1977) In fact, even a single prior exposure to a fake news headline is sufficient to increase the later perceived veracity of the news (Pennycook et al., 2018)
Confirmation bias is another cognitive factor that affects people’s ability to discern between true and fake news articles (Beauvais, 2022) It connotes the seeking and interpreting of evidence in ways that are concordant with people’s existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses in hand (Nickerson, 1998) Confirmation bias or evaluating new information considering how well it aligns with one’s prior beliefs (Pennycook & Rand, 2021), appears to be one of the ways in which people judge online news articles Preston et al (2021) conducted an experimental study in which 107 individuals were
8 exposed to six false and real news items presented in the Facebook format The qualitative analysis of participants’ responses found four main themes explaining the reasons for their judgment of news’ trustworthiness Among these four themes, two of which are the false news fitting with personal experiences and pre-existing beliefs of participants These findings indicate that participants seem to evaluate online information based on how well it is consistent with their pre-existing beliefs
Another determinant that influences people’s evaluation of news online comes from the field of reasoning (Beauvais, 2022; Pennycook & Rand, 2021) Research on the cognitive science of reasoning has a particular focus on the dual-process theories suggesting that human cognition can be categorized into two different processes with distinct characteristics: autonomous, intuitive processes and deliberative, analytic processes (Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Neys, 2017; Pennycook et al., 2015) Recent studies found that people who have analytic thinking are less likely to believe false news content and better at discerning between truth and falsehood than those relying on intuitive thinking (e.g., Bago et al., 2019; Bronstein et al., 2019; Pehlivanoglu et al., 2021;
Trust in “elite” messages is another important cognitive factor leading people to fall for fake news (Beauvais, 2022) People tend to believe the information provided by those whom they view as being credible (Pennycook & Rand, 2021) For example, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine Winner Dr Montagnier’s statements about the origin of the novel virus seemed to be linked to the rapid increase of fake articles relating to the topic
“coronavirus HIV” (Moscadelli et al., 2020) The influence of this cognitive factor is also demonstrated when attributing a false claim to President Trump increased Trump supporters’ belief in the claim while the opposite was true for Democrats (Swire et al.,
These cognitive factors correspond well with the three out of five criteria people use for judging the truth of statements proposed by Schwarz et al (2016) People assess each of these criteria, namely social consensus, support, consistency, coherence, and credibility, in two ways: analytic evaluation and intuitive evaluation (Schwarz et al., 2016) These two ways of evaluating undergo all the five criteria, and they seem to match with the cognitive factor named types of reasoning mentioned above
Social consensus is often considered a gauge for what is likely to be correct when the truth is unclear (Festinger, 1954) To check whether a statement is widely held or not, people often use external resources such as opinion polls and databases (Schwarz et al.,
2016) A more intuitive approach to verifying a statement’s social consensus is to rely on the familiarity of a statement (Schwarz et al., 2016) This way of verification seems to match with the cognitive factor leading people to believe in false news content mentioned above, namely familiarity
Consistency deals with how compatible with what people believe a piece of new information is (Schwarz et al., 2016) According to Schwarz et al (2016), people are inclined to believe things that align with their own beliefs and knowledge, which, to some extent, seems similar to the aforementioned cognitive factor: confirmation bias Another criterion that appears to correspond with the cognitive factors affecting people’s evaluation of news online is credibility According to Schwarz et al (2016), people tend to ask themselves whether the statement comes from a credible source when they evaluate the truth of a statement
Apart from factors affecting the extent to which people believe and share fake news, people's ability to identify and evaluate fake news has also been investigated in the literature For example, Metzger et al (2015) conducted a study in which 2747 11 to 18- year-old Internet users were presented with a screenshot of a hoax website and asked how much they believed the information on the website In this study, 50.4% of participants reported believing “at least some” of the information on the hoax website In a survey conducted by Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), 1208 US adults were shown 15 news headlines about the 2016 presidential election and asked whether they believed the statements in the headlines or not According to this study, people with higher education had more accurate beliefs about the news while people who reported social media as their most important sources of election news were more likely to believe statements in false headlines
Leeder (2019) surveyed 63 undergraduates from a public university in the United States In this study, participants were presented with 12 news stories (six real, six fake) and asked to identify fake and real articles Their information-seeking behaviors were also measured to investigate the relation between these behaviors and undergraduates’ ability to accurately identify online news stories Results showed that certain information-seeking behaviors correlated with accurate identifications of fake and real news articles, such as the
10 behavior of examining the rest of the web page to evaluate the reliability of the information By contrast, the study showed correlations between the use of behaviors (e.g relying on the top items from a search results list) with incorrect identifications of news articles
Research into fake news has progressed exponentially in recent years (Beauvais, 2022; Greene & Murphy, 2021), yet there are still gaps in the literature that need to be addressed Firstly, while a large body of existing literature has studied the factors affecting people’s beliefs in fake news as well as people’s ability to discern fake news from true news, people’s behaviors relating to identifying and evaluating fake news stories have not been given much attention Secondly, most of the previous papers focused on the judgment of online information using news headlines only, which “does not capture the rich context news is frequently encountered in real life” (Pehlivanoglu et al., 2021, p 2) Thirdly, while these studies investigate people’s ability to identify fake news, they focus mainly on the ability of the Americans, with little attention paid to the capacity of people from other countries Lastly, apart from the widespread assumption that fake news has a negative impact (Greene & Murphy, 2021; Tandoc, 2019), little work has been done to explore the effect of exposure to fake news on people’s behaviors (Greene & Murphy, 2021) This study aims to address these gaps in the literature
Methodology
Participants
This study used convenience sampling It is a type of non-probability sampling in which the primary consideration is the ease with which potential participants can be recruited (Baker et al., 2013) With this kind of sampling, members of the target population are selected for the study if they meet certain criteria such as easy accessibility and the willingness to volunteer (Dửrnyei, 2007) As a result, one of the major disadvantages of convenience sampling is that it may suffer from many potential sources of bias (Baker et al., 2013) Another key drawback of this sampling is that it lacks clear generalizability (Jager et al., 2017) In other words, the results being drawn from a study deploying a convenience sample cannot be extended to a general population, rather they can only be applied to the participants in the research (Stratton, 2021) Despite these disadvantages, convenience sampling is still deployed in this research because it is more economical, less time-consuming, and simpler than other forms of sampling (Jager et al., 2017; Stratton,
2021) Furthermore, this kind of sampling can help in obtaining a range of attitudes and opinions and identifying tentative hypotheses that can be tested more carefully in further research (Kempf-Leonard, 2005)
The participants consisted of four undergraduate students studying at a language- major university in Vietnam Students studying at this public institution are equipped with critical information evaluation skills via courses in the curriculum All participants in this study were female and majored in English The pseudonyms of the first, second, third, and last participants were PA, PB, PC, and PD, respectively While participant PB was a third-
12 year student, the other three participants were in their last year of university In terms of age, participants PA, PB, and PD were 22 years old at the time of participating while participant PC was 23 years old.
Procedures
The author began the process by providing participants with a consent form in which participants were informed that the study aimed to investigate Vietnamese college students’ news consumption behavior during the times of Covid-19 No reference was made to fake news in order to avoid exerting any influence on participants’ evaluation of online news articles The consent form is presented in Appendix A
Following their consent to participate, participants were requested to perform two tasks that served the purpose of fostering their understanding of the verbal protocol The first task was to count aloud the number of windows in their home while thinking aloud The second one was a reading task similar to the ones used in the study Participants were allowed to think aloud in either English or Vietnamese Should there be any misconceptions, they would be corrected before going on to the next step
Next, the author informed the participants that they would be asked to perform a reading task The author then sent participants a Word document stating the task and participants were requested to verbalize their thoughts while reading each online news article Information about how the new stories were selected is presented below, and the document is provided in Appendix B Individuals started performing the task, and the researcher only intervened by saying “keep talking” when participants were silent for a long period of time
Interactions with the participants took place online via Zoom Client for Meeting for two reasons Firstly, this research was undertaken when preventive measures were implemented in Vietnam to contain the spread of the coronavirus, hence virtual meetings were a more appropriate approach compared to face-to-face meetings Secondly, conducting the interviews on Zoom allowed not only the sounds but also the images to be recorded Each participant was observed individually via the application, starting from the moment when they received the tasks The video recording was then archived for subsequent analysis Participants were also requested to record their verbal reports during the study on their phones in case of Internet failure
After the task was completed, participants were asked to participate in a post-task semi-structured interview and their responses were triangulated with the results of the verbal protocols to increase data reliability The post-task interview questions focus on participants’ ways to judge the reliability of online information and their intention to adopt the behaviors suggested in the articles They can be found in Appendix C Participants were provided with opportunities to ask for clarification of any of the components of the research.
Selection of New Stories
Recent fake news articles were selected from sources such as Snopes.com, a famous fact-checking website in the United States, and a dataset collected by the Empirical Studies of Conflict together with Microsoft Research Real news articles presenting unusual or surprising headlines were chosen from reputable news sources so that each news story would require a comparable amount of effort to evaluate, regardless of being real or fake Real articles from news sources such as CNN, the New York Times, and The Washington Post were excluded in an attempt to reduce the possibility of familiarity and any potentially biased judgment toward the sources
In terms of topic, news articles were mainly related to COVID-19 health information which was expected to result in a change in participants’ behaviors such as consuming a particular food or vitamin The topic was chosen in order to assess the relationship between participants’ evaluation of news and their intention to adopt the behaviors suggested in the articles In total, three articles were selected with one real news story and two fake news stories While the fake news article named “Vitamin C protects against Coronavirus” was selected from the dataset mentioned above, the other fake news story was chosen from the famous fact-checking website named “Snopes.com” These two articles were selected because they were suitable for the purpose of the study Firstly, they included false information presented in the form of a news format Secondly, these two news stories mentioned the behaviors which could be used to assess participants’ evaluation of news and their intention to act accordingly This second reason was also one of the reasons why the true news story was selected Another reason for the selection of the true news article is that it was somehow similar to one of the fake news stories
Specifically, while this true news article was about Vitamin D supplements, one of the fake
14 news stories was related to vitamin C The story headlines and type are shown in Table 1 The screenshots of the original stories can be found in Appendix D
News Story Headline, Story Type, and Story ID
News story headline Type ID
Every adult in Ireland should take vitamin D supplements, report recommends
Vitamin C protects against Coronavirus Fake Vitamin C
COVID-19 Found in Toilet Paper Fake Toilet paper
Data Coding and Analysis
Analysis of the data began with transcribing the verbal protocols and interviews The transcription style for analyzing data in this research was denaturalized verbatim transcription Denaturalized transcription is the type of transcription in which everything in the audio including utterances, mistakes, repetitions, and all grammatical errors are transcribed (Bucholtz, 2000)
Next, the verbatim transcription was coded The coding system for analyzing the thinking aloud protocols was developed using an inductive-deductive method In this study, that means the codes utilized in this study were constructed in two ways: using the codes emerging from the verbatim transcription (i.e., the inductive approach) and codes being taken from models and previous research academic theories described in the
Literature Review (i.e., the deductive approach) After several iterations, the coding system was finalized, and it is presented in Appendix E The verbatim transcription was coded in terms of statements, and the frequency with which information-seeking behaviors were mentioned was calculated
Findings and Discussion
Information-Seeking Behaviors That Participants Performed While Evaluating News Articles
The first purpose of this research paper was to investigate Vietnamese college students’ information-seeking behaviors around evaluating fake news on social media platforms Specifically, research question number 1 asked: “What information-seeking behaviors are performed when Vietnamese college students evaluate news articles?" The answer to this research question is presented in this section
4.1.1 An Overall Picture of the Information-Seeking Behaviors Used by all Participants in This Study
Information-seeking behaviors used by participants while they performed the task are detailed in Table 3 Processing information was by far the most common information- seeking behavior deployed by participants when they evaluated news stories, with 83.1% of participants’ statements falling into this category The figures for two other behaviors, namely searching and scanning information, were much lower, at 11.3% and 5.6% respectively While processing information was performed by all of the participants several times throughout the process of news evaluation, most of the participants who searched and scanned information performed these behaviors only once
Check the rest of the website 0 0 0 1 1 (1.4%)
4.1.2 Processing Information: The Most Common Information-Seeking Behaviors in This Study
While processing the information on the texts, participants elaborated on the content of the articles and judged the processed information Analyzing was the only activity observed when the four students elaborated on the content Examples of participants’ performances of this activity are provided in Table 4
Examples of Participants’ Performances of Analyzing News Articles
Text analysis in terms of …
Participants’ statements Article ID Participant
But how many people or how many people out of the total population participated in this report or this survey?
Author’s purpose Does this article advertise something as it advises…
Intended audience It’s too detailed, feel like it’s too specialized…so doctors read it to establish…
Means that if they are provided with more vitamin D, there will be less death, right?
Regarding the judgment of the processed information, comparing the information on the text with their prior knowledge was the most common activity In this study, all participants compared their prior knowledge with the information they read from the text in order to judge the processed information, as demonstrated in examples 1 and 2 While in these examples, participants PC and PD expressed different perspectives on two items of information (i.e., PC disagreed with the information whereas PD agreed with another piece of information), it is my interpretation that they both had to access their prior knowledge to make these comments Other popular activities carried out for judging the processed information include checking the familiarity of the information (Example 3), the references listed in the article (Example 4 and 5), and the name of the website (Example 6)
Participants also evaluated the URL (Example 7), checked the rest of the websites
(Example 8), and checked the date on which the articles were published (Example 9) However, these activities were only performed once
Example 1: There’s nothing that protects against coronavirus (after participant PC read the title “Vitamin C protects against coronavirus”)
Example 2: Yes, that’s right (after PD read this sentence “Vitamin C, vitamin D, Maggie, and Zinc have been shown to strengthen the immune system against the virus”)
Example 3: I might have heard of this before, but let’s check it (PC, Toilet paper) Example 4: Oh… there are references in this article (PB, Vitamin C)
Example 5: There isn’t any reference list in this news item (PB, Toilet paper) Example 6: The Irish Times…about what? what times…seems strange (PC, Vitamin D)
Example 7: On this paper… com (PB, Vitamin D)
Example 8: The categories aren’t organized logically (Vitamin D, PD)
Example 9: Information was published in 2021 (PB, Vitamin D)
These results support the findings of previous research on the criteria that people employ to evaluate the truth of information (e.g., Cooke, 2017; Metzger et al., 2015; Schwarz et al., 2016) Specifically, some of these behaviors are similar to the three out of five key criteria for judging the truth of a statement identified by Schwarz et al (2016): assessing its social consensus (being similar to the behavior of checking the familiarity of the information), determining its compatibility with their beliefs (corresponding with comparing the information with their prior knowledge), and judging the credibility of the
18 source of information (matching with the behavior of checking the website name and evaluating the URL) Metzger et al (2015), using factor analyses with Varimax Rotation, detected three strategies for evaluating the credibility of online information The first strategy involved consulting others and looking to see if the information was from expert sources, which seems similar to participants’ behaviors of checking the website name and the reference list The second one was related to the currency and completeness of the information, which match with the participants’ behavior of checking the date on which the articles were published The last strategy involved evaluating information in terms of the web design, which seems correspond with the participants’ behaviors of checking the rest of the websites in this study
Searching for information consists of two activities: Deriving search terms and judging search results (Brand-Gruwel et al., 2005) In terms of the former activity, most of the participants copied words, phrases, and even sentences from the articles and used them as search terms For example, when participant PC read the statistics mentioned in the article, her statements expressed that she was skeptical about the credibility of the information (Example 10) She then copied the sentence “An estimated 6000 more people have contracted the virus in the United States tied to a contamination of toilet paper” and pasted it to the search engine Apart from copying the word from the article, participant PA also came up with her own search terms as demonstrated in her statement (Example 11) She then typed in the search engine “What’s the difference between UVA and UVB”
Example 10: This number [6000 more people] may be correct… Really? … It does not feel really believable I probably heard of this before (Covid-19 found in toilet paper), but let’s check it (PC, Toilet paper)
Example 11: I will search what the difference between UVA and UVB is (PA, Vitamin D)
Judging the search results were observed to be used by three participants Only two of them thought aloud when they judged the search results while this behavior of the other one could be observed from the video recording Participants seemed to judge the search results based on criteria such as their relevance to the search information, their correspondence with the participant’s opinions, or the reliability of the source For example, when participant PC was suspicious of the information “An estimated 6000 more
19 people have contracted the virus in the United States tied to a contamination of toilet paper” and searched for it She chose the second search result which was “Fake news: Covid-19 found in toilet paper” and remarked, “It seems like I’m right” When she was not able to open this page, she scrolled down the search result page and selected the source
“Only 50 people are known to have contracted… more than…” which had some similar words to the search prompt Participant PC seemed to evaluate the search results based on the source as she commented, “Oh… there’s even a research paper”
After selecting the source to read information, participants scanned the site to get the information that they needed Elaborating on the content as well as judging scanned information seemed not to be performed carefully by these participants For example, when participant PA searched for the number of sunny hours in Ireland, she scanned the site for that information and found “the sunshine durations are only 5 to 6 hours per day over the country” It was observed from the video recording that she also highlighted some related information on the website After reading these pieces of information, she said “Ok, done Now I will continue reading the article in the task” No elaboration or judgment was carried out by this participant When participant PB scanned the site for information, she found “(The Covid-19 pandemic has been) associated with a worldwide increase in toilet paper hoarding” She made a comment “Seems reliable”, which is interesting because the scanned information was different from the information that she looked for (i.e., Covid-19 found in toilet paper)
Searching and scanning information seemed to be only performed when participants wanted to check the truthfulness of some information they encountered when they processed information For example, participant PA searched for the number of sunny hours in Ireland when she encountered the information in the article stating that there was a lack of sunlight in this country She typed in the search engine: “What time in the morning does it start to be sunny in Ireland?” She changed her search terms several times before she scanned the selected source and got the needed information on which she remarked: “It seems like this country has less sunlight than Vietnam The sunshine duration lasts only 5 to 6 hours per day over the country… Okay, done Now I continue reading the article at hand” I interpreted her comments as she searched for this information in order to confirm
20 the reliability of the information “Ireland’s lack of sunlight” and it seemed that the found information proved this piece of information correct
The order of these information-seeking behaviors in this study was different from that in the study conducted by Brand-Gruwel et al (2005) However, these findings are expected because of the nature of the task given to participants in this study The task required participants to read and rate the trustworthiness and believability of three articles Therefore, it was comprehensible that participants performed the behavior of processing information (which involved elaborating and judging the processed information) more frequently than they performed the searching and scanning behaviors Furthermore, the task in this study is different from the one used in the study conducted by Brand-Gruwel et al (2005) In their study, participants were asked to use information from the Internet to build up an argument Nonetheless, in this study, participants were provided with links to the website on which three articles were posted Therefore, instead of searching and scanning information before processing information like participants in the study of Brand-Gruwel et al (2005) did, participants in this study could process information without having to perform these two activities Later on, during the task performance, the need to search and scan information emerged as participants wanted to check the truthfulness of some pieces of information which they had doubts about or which they did not have prior knowledge of.
Information-Seeking Behaviors Associated with Participants’ Correct Evaluations of
Evaluations of Online News Stories
The second purpose of this study was to gain insights into participants’ information-seeking behaviors associated with their correct evaluation of online news articles Therefore, research question number 2 asked: “What information-seeking behaviors are associated with Vietnamese college students’ ability to correctly evaluate the trustworthiness and credibility of online news?" During the process of analyzing data in order to find answers to this question, the researcher noticed the information-seeking behaviors which seemed to play a determining role in participants’ evaluation of news stories The patterns that participants tended to follow when they made judgments of news articles were also observed Based on these two findings, the information-seeking behaviors associated with participants’ correct judgments of online news articles were able to be identified
4.2.1 The Determining Factors in Participants’ Evaluation of Online News Stories
Amongst the aforementioned information-seeking behaviors, three particular behaviors (i.e., analyzing information, comparing the information with prior knowledge, and checking the familiarity of information) seem to play a determining role in participants’ evaluation of online news articles because of two reasons The first reason is that they are the only two behaviors deployed by all participants when evaluating the believability and trustworthiness of all news articles By contrast, other behaviors such as evaluating the website’s name and checking the rest of the website were only used by mainly two participants in two out of the three articles As a result, while the frequency of analyzing information and comparing the information with prior knowledge was the highest, the frequency of other information-seeking behaviors was much lower, as demonstrated in Table 3
More importantly, it is observed that when the behaviors of analyzing information and comparing the information with prior knowledge were used together with other behaviors in an article, participants tended to rely more on these three behaviors to make the final evaluation For example, when judging the information in the article coded
Vitamin C, participant PB checked the name of the website and checked the familiarity of the information in the article After reading the title of the article, which is “Vitamin C protects against coronavirus”, she remarked, “I regularly hear about this” She scored the believability of an article 5 despite her comment on the name of the website “Health impact news… looks strange” Moreover, although participant PC checked the website’s name, her evaluation of the credibility and trustworthiness of the article seemed to be based on her prior knowledge She remarked:
The Irish Times…about what? what times…seems strange… In short, the report says that in Ireland, people are deficient [in vitamin D] … listing the figures The main reason is Ireland’s lack of sunlight, so what should we add… [The article] emphasizes that this is important, vitamin D is important…Feel like it’s [the article] believable, but not very believable as there are other factors
4.2.2 The Patterns in Evaluating Online News Articles
In this study, participants seemed to follow a pattern when they evaluated the trustworthiness and credibility of online news stories First, they read and/or analyzed the text to understand the information in the article, and then they assessed its match with their
22 prior knowledge or with the same information from other sources In cases when they did not have background knowledge related to the information they read from the text, or they had doubts about the credibility of information, they tended to search for that piece of information so as to check its credibility
It is not always the case that all three activities were performed when participants evaluated an item of information Sometimes, participants read the information, and analyzed the text, as participant PD’s statements indicate: “First, the current situation is discussed, the next part is about the reason which is the lack of sunlight, what’s next? Patient profiling…the conclusion is not very clear, and it doesn’t summarize the ideas.” Participant PC read and tried to understand the implicit meanings of the sentences in the text as follows:
Residents of nursing homes also spend limited time outdoors, especially during Covid times…They [nursing home residents] are said to be deficient [in vitamin D] in the previous part, now they are said to spend limited time outdoors Does it imply that nursing homes are not good?
Participants also read the information in the text and then made comparisons between their prior knowledge and the information at hand For example, after reading the solution presented in the text which was using a wet washcloth instead of toilet paper to clean oneself, participant PA used her prior knowledge to judge the validity of this solution She remarked, “I think a wet washcloth is the same [as toilet papers] It [the coronavirus] can live in a washcloth, too…” Participant PC also compared her prior knowledge with the information she read from the text, as her following statements indicate:
[Covid-19 found in] toilet paper… the title sounds weird Really? I suppose that it [the coronavirus] lives in animals Why [does it mention] surfaces here? But it can be possible… like when [somebody] coughs on surfaces and then [other people] touch these surfaces, Covid-19 viruses can be transmitted
Occasionally, they read, analyzed the information, and then compared the information with their knowledge For example, after reading the whole article with the ID Vitamin D, participant PC analyzed the text by structuring it and compared the information with her prior knowledge as follows:
In short, the report says that in Ireland, people are deficient [in vitamin D] … listing the figures The main reason is Ireland’s lack of sunlight, so what should we
23 add… [The article] emphasizes that this is important, vitamin D is important…Feel like it’s [the article] believable, but not very believable as there are other factors
4.2.3 Content Analysis: The Difference Between Correct and Incorrect Evaluations of Online News Stories
Amongst the three aforementioned patterns of evaluating online news stories, the last pattern in which participants performed all three activities (i.e., reading, analyzing, and comparing) seemed to be associated with the correct evaluation of an article By contrast, the second pattern in which participants only read the information and then compared it with their background knowledge seemed to be linked to the incorrect evaluation of an online news story In this study, participants were asked to evaluate the credibility of online news articles on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 to 5 with 1 being “very unbelievable/untrustworthy” and 5 being “very believable/trustworthy” If a fake news story is scored less than or equal to three, the evaluation is considered correct And if a real article is rated higher than three, the participant is considered to rate the article correctly The frequency of which each activity was performed in each article by individuals was detailed in Table 4
The Frequency of Analyzing and Comparing Activities by Individuals in Each Article
While participants analyzed the content of almost all articles that they evaluated correctly, it is observed that participants did not perform content analysis in almost all of the incorrectly evaluated news articles For example, when participant PD evaluated the trustworthiness and credibility of the article coded as Toilet paper, she only read the article and compared the information with her knowledge as she remarked, “Not sure but it [the coronavirus] can survive on surfaces, then it's possible that it can survive on toilet paper” This suggests that analyzing text plays a critical role in participants’ ability to correctly evaluate online news articles
The role of content analysis is also demonstrated in cases when participants used familiarity as a criterion for the judgment of online news For example, when participant
PB evaluated the article coded as Vitamin C, she only read the article and commented on its familiarity, “I hear about this regularly” Similar to participant PB, participant PC also stated that she had heard of the information in the article Toilet Paper before However, instead of simply reading the article, participant PC broke down its ideas and structure to understand it better, think critically about it, and draw conclusions, as indicated by her statements:
Truthfulness Ratings and Related Behavioral Intentions
The last purpose of this study was to explore Vietnamese college students’ perceived truthfulness of online news stories and their intentions to act accordingly to the information presented in the articles Hence, research question 3 was stated as follows:
“How do their evaluations relate to their intentions of behaving accordingly?” After participating in the think-aloud session, participants took part in a post-task interview in which they were asked to rate their intentions to conduct three health behaviors over the next several months They rated each statement on a 5-point scale, with 1 being “Strong disagree” and 5 being “Strongly agree” Participants’ evaluation of each news article and their intentions to conduct the three health behaviors were detailed in Table 5
Participants’ Scores of Online Articles’ Evaluation and Intention to Act Accordingly
Article ID PA PB PC PD
Note E = Evaluation score I = Score of participant’s intention to conduct health behaviors
Participants’ perceived truthfulness of a news article seems not to be associated with their intentions to behave accordingly While the real news story scored the highest average score of believability and trustworthiness, participants’ intentions to take up the health behavior mentioned in this story were relatively low, at 3.25 only Meanwhile, participants showed the strongest intention of taking up the health behavior mentioned in the fake news story This fake news article was rated as the second-most believable and trustworthy on average
It is clearly seen from the table that a higher score of believability and trustworthiness does not indicate a stronger intention to behave accordingly For example, the participant PA rated the news article Vitamin D the highest score of 5, but she only scored her intention to take vitamin D supplements 2 Interestingly, participants PB, PC, and PD gave two out of three articles the same score on believability, but their intentions to take up health behaviors suggested in these two stories were not the same For example,
26 while participant PB rated both stories coded as Vitamin D and Toilet paper 4 on believability, her intention to take vitamin D was stronger than that of using a wet cloth to clean herself after going to the bathroom
The study showed that participants’ evaluations of online information seemed not to be associated with their intentions to behave accordingly In the present study, a higher score of believability and trustworthiness does not indicate a stronger intention to behave accordingly Interestingly, participants’ intentions to engage in behaviors suggested by stories with the same score of believability and trustworthiness were not the same
This finding is not consistent with the findings of a study conducted by Greene & Murphy (2021) in which people evaluating fake news stories to be more truthful reported stronger intentions to adopt the behavior suggested by the story This may be because the behaviors assessed in this study were different from the ones assessed in the study of Greene and Murphy These researchers acknowledged that the effects of perceived truthfulness on participants’ intentions in their study “may be sui generis and may not generalize to other behaviors” (Greene & Murphy, 2021, p 10)
Conclusion
This study investigated Vietnamese college students’ information-seeking behaviors around evaluating online news articles The purpose of this research paper was threefold The first was to investigate Vietnamese college students’ information-seeking behaviors around evaluating fake news on social media platforms, specifically Facebook The second purpose of this study was to gain insights into participants’ information- seeking behaviors associated with their correct evaluation of online news articles Lastly, this study attempted to explore any links between Vietnamese college students’ evaluation of online fake news and their decision-making In order to pursue these goals, the concurrent think-aloud method and a semi-structured interview were deployed In terms of participants, this study used convenience sampling with the participation of four undergraduates at a language-major university in Vietnam
This study found that when evaluating the trustworthiness and credibility of online news articles, participants performed three main information-seeking behaviors: processing information, searching for information, and scanning information While processing information was the most popular information-seeking behavior, the other two behaviors were much less common and only performed when participants wanted to check on the credibility of information they encountered in the articles When processing information, participants analyzed the articles and judged the processed information by performing behaviors such as comparing the information with prior knowledge and checking the familiarity of the information Moreover, this study also found that analyzing information was associated with the correct evaluation of online information Another finding of this study is that there seems to be no link between participants’ evaluations of online information and their intentions to adopt the health-related behaviors suggested in the three articles
The findings of this study make some contributions to the literature The first contribution is to identify participants’ specific information-seeking behaviors around evaluating the believability and trustworthiness of online information The present study also adds to the literature by investigating information-seeking behaviors associated with participants’ correct evaluation of online news articles and studying the link between perceived truthfulness of online information and participants’ intention to take up the behaviors suggested by these news stories While a large body of research has investigated people’s ability to evaluate and identify fake news, people’s specific behaviors associated
28 with correct evaluations of fake news have not been given much attention The same holds true for the research on the effects of fake news on people’s decision-making (Greene & Murphy, 2021)
This research also makes some contributions to the literature on the relationship between types of reasoning and truth discernment Results from this study are consistent with recent studies which found that analytic cognitive style plays an important role in truth discernment (e.g., Bago et al., 2019; Bronstein et al., 2019; Pehlivanoglu et al., 2021; Pennycook & Grand, 2019) Put differently, this research suggests that it’s the intuitive style of thinking that causes people to fall for fake news articles related to health
This study also has an important practical implication During the times of COVID-
19 when having high-quality information may be literally a matter of life and death
(Pennycook et al., 2020), people’s ability to discern true news and fake news is of utter importance This study investigated college students’ information-seeking behaviors around evaluating online information and it also identified the behaviors associated with participants’ correct evaluation of information online This research paper, therefore, provides evidence for the types of evaluation strategies that educators should promote among college students so that they are more likely to evaluate online information correctly
This research has several limitations Firstly, asking participants to rate the trustworthiness and believability of online news articles may have caused them to be more critical than they would under real-life conditions Secondly, choosing the article coded as Vitamin C as one of the articles to be evaluated in the study can be another limitation As all of the participants in this study shared that they had frequently heard of taking Vitamin
C supplements to boost the immunity system before they took the study, this might affect their intention to take Vitamin C regardless of their evaluation of the article in the study Lastly, as convenience sampling was employed in this study, the findings being drawn from this paper are restricted to the participants in the study only and cannot be applied to a general population
There are several possible directions for future studies arising from the findings of this study Future research could investigate the specific information-seeking behaviors Vietnamese college students performed while evaluating online news articles with a larger number of participants and a different form of sampling In this way, the findings of these future studies could be extended to a general population Future research could also study
29 the link between reading fake news articles on subsequent behaviors Fake news is widely assumed to have negative impacts (Greene & Murphy, 2021; Tandoc, 2019), and little work has been done to explore the effect of exposure to fake news on people’s behaviors (Greene & Murphy, 2021) Therefore, studies into the effect of fake news on subsequent behaviors are much needed
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World Health Organization [@World Health Organization] (2020, February 15) ―We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this #coronavirus & is just as dangerous‖ Twitter
Retrieved October 30, 2021, from https://twitter.com/who/status/1228683949796470784?lang=en
World Health Organization (2020, August 25) Immunizing the public against misinformation WHO | World Health Organization https://www.who.int/news- room/feature-stories/detail/immunizing-the-public-against-misinformation
Zhou, X., & Zafarani, R (2020) A survey of fake news: Fundamental theories, detection methods, and opportunities ACM Computing Surveys, 53(5), 1-
Thank you for your interest in this research study This study aims to investigate
Vietnamese college students’ news consumption behavior during the times of COVID-19
What happens if you decide to participate in this research?
The paper presents you with some online news articles related to the coronavirus, and then you will be asked to speak what is on your mind while you are reading these news stories Afterward, you will be asked to participate in an interview The process will take place online via Zoom Client for Meeting, and the meeting will be recorded for later analysis You will also be requested to record your speaking on your mobile phone in case of
How will your privacy be protected?