Does Seeing Social Media Comments on a News Story Impact How Readers View the Story?
Dr. Alexander Moe of the Department of Journalism, Broadcasting, and Public Relations is co-author of a study that found it does.
Dr. Moe, along with colleagues from Texas Tech University and the University of Tennesee, Knoxville, have had their article, “Social media users (under)appreciate the news: An application of hostile media bias to news disseminated on Facebook” published in the Newspaper Research Journal, the official peer-reviewed publication of the Newspaper and Online News Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).
The scholars used an experiment to study the influence of reading comments about a news story before reading the actual story. They found the comments “induced hostile media perceptions.”