Who Posted That Story? Processing Layered Sources in Facebook News Posts

With social media platforms becoming primary news sources, concerns about credibility judgments and knowledge grow. This study (N = 233) experimentally tests the effects of multiple source cues on Facebook news posts on credibility and knowledge. Judgments of story credibility were directly influenced by media source cues, but not friend source cues. Involvement in the source topic moderated the effects of these source cues, such that particular combinations influenced credibility differently, and also influenced cognitive elaboration about the topic. Theoretical implications for cognitive mediation model of learning from the news and the heuristic-systematic model of information processing are presented.