Media Trust and Information Quality in the Digital Age

This presentation will focus on three areas of research our work has identified as key to understanding the contemporary U.S. media and information environment, along with the challenges and opportunities each presents for public opinion polling in the digital age:
Studying news consumption on social media platforms: Our recent work capturing user behaviors and views on four different social media platforms captures the importance and difficulty of capturing the diversity of the public’s experiences within platforms, rather than studying social media as a monolith. Our work finds that news consumption on social media is often incidental–minorities of users of three of the four sites said that getting news is a reason they use the site–but large majorities of users of each say that they see some kind of news-related content there, and what this content looks like differs in important ways across platforms.
Interpreting media trust: Like Gallup and other organizations, we have long asked broad measures of public trust in the information people get from national news organizations, local news organizations, and social media. Over the past eight years, we’ve seen growing partisan trust divides, and most questions about “the media” broadly now trigger strong negative responses among many Republicans. This makes trust measures particularly interesting, but it also identifies a challenge for understanding broad news attitudes that often rely on self-defined terms.
Understanding views on information quality: In an effort to expand beyond media trust, we have begun to increase our focus on surveys about people’s perceptions of the quality and accuracy of the information available to them. Understanding information quality is particularly important in a digital era of AI-generated content and algorithmic curation. However, intense partisan divides and increasing debates over what constitutes “truth” or “misinformation” can make this work challenging to both study and interpret.