From Syndication to Misinformation: How Undergraduate Students Engage with and Evaluate Digital News

Abstract

To determine how undergraduate students engage with digital news, researchers at Davidson College surveyed 511 incoming first-year students on their news consumption habits and asked them to evaluate screenshots of news stories. The researchers found that a high percentage of the students were accessing news through social media platforms and that syndication and fake URLs posed challenges for them in making accurate evaluations. Additionally, students indicated they would share a tweet containing an impostor URL at higher rates than they would share the other news story examples. The findings have implications for how educators teach students to evaluate misinformation.