I'm not fluent: How linguistic fluency, new media literacy, and personality traits influence fake news engagement behavior on social media

Abstract

Disinformation researchers have much to learn about the psychological factors that lead to users’ biases. The gap in users’ new media literacy, along with personality traits, are factors that may contribute to bias. We conducted an experiment that varied levels of articles' linguistic veracity to determine how these factors influence users' engagement behavior. We found that users with higher literacy in new media were less likely to engage with disinformation featuring low veracity language. However, users with higher literacy in traditional media were more likely to engage with disinformation, regardless of the article's linguistic veracity.