From news disengagement to fake news engagement: Examining the role of news-finds-me perceptions in vulnerability to fake news through third-person perception

Abstract

Despite the wealth of literature vested in the association between social media use and vulnerability to fake news, it remains underexplored how and what kinds of social media usage contribute to fake news susceptibility. To fill this research gap, we draw upon the emergent scholarship of News-Finds-Me and propose a new conceptual model to examine fake news vulnerability and engagement in digital worlds. Drawing upon an online national sample in the US (N = 1014), results corroborated the prevalence of the News-Finds-Me perception, a social media-derived news attainment pattern that propels users to misconceive knowledgeability, over-depend on intimate peers and algorithms, and disengage from active news learning. Furthermore, evidence showed that News-Finds-Me perceptions make individuals more likely to believe and share fake news by creating a biased mentality that one is fake-news-proof while others are fake-news-impressionable. Such an asymmetric cognitive fallacy is called Third-Person Perception in literature. Our findings elucidate that the widely noted social media empowerment hypothesis might be double-sided. While social media can facilitate the dissemination and diversification of knowledge, they may also foster a sense of illusioned knowledgeability and overconfidence. This, in turn, could impede users from being adequately informed.