Turn a Blind Eye If You Care: Impacts of Attitude Consistency,Importance, and Credibility on Seeking of Political Information and Implications for Attitudes

Abundant media outlets allow for much diversity of political messages and selective use among citizens. A 2‐session online field study examined impacts of attitude consistency, attitude importance, and source credibility on selective exposure to political messages and subsequent attitude accessibility. The first session assessed attitudes and their accessibility. In the second session, participants browsed online search results that featured attitude‐consistent and attitude‐discrepant messages associated with sources of either high or low credibility; selective reading was tracked. Then attitude accessibility was measured again. Participants spent less time with attitude‐discrepant messages compared to attitude‐consistent messages; this pattern was particularly pronounced among participants with higher attitude importance. Low importance fostered exposure to high‐credibility messages. Exposure to attitude‐discrepant, high‐credibility messages reduced attitude accessibility.     

User generated content and credibility evaluation of online health information: A meta analytic study

The present study provides a meta-analysis of perceived credibility concerns for user-generated-online-health information. Past work yields inconsistent findings regarding whether high credible versus low credible sources would relate to perceived credibility of online health information. A collection of empirical studies was synthesized to reach an explanation of the conflicting findings. Analysis of 22 effect sizes with 1346 participants indicated that source credibility had no significant overall influence on perceived information credibility (r = 0.03, n.s.). However, the variances across the studies suggest that the platform where the information was posted might be a contingent factor. Specifically, when user-generated health information was posted on a common website, high credible sources were significantly related to high perceived information credibility.     

Exploring social and psychological factors that influence the gathering of political information online

Qualitative analysis of college students who searched online during the 2008 US presidential election contributes to three research areas: uses and gratifications, media credibility, and selective exposure. The findings identified new social factors that trigger motivations and psychological factors that affect patterns of media use for political information gathering. Word-of-mouth communication from strong, weak, and nonexistent social ties triggered social utility and information seeking motivations. Offline media contributed to online information seeking. Moderate credibility perceptions of media and weak party loyalty limited ideological selective exposure. Results add to research that links social and psychological factors to motivations and media use.     

Reinforcement of the Political Self Through Selective Exposure to Political Messages

The idea that recipients prefer messages that reinforce preexisting attitudes and self‐perceptions has pervaded much communication research, but effects of selective exposure are rarely examined. This 2‐session experiment (n = 157) investigates such effects. The first session presented computerized questions on 12 political issue attitudes and political self‐concept. Accessibility data were collected based on response times. In the second session, participants browsed through an online magazine including 4 of the 12 issues, each issue being covered by 2 articles featuring opposing viewpoints. Selective exposure was logged and categorized as attitude‐consistent or counterattitudinal. Finally, a questionnaire repeated measures for attitudes and self‐concept. The results show that participants preferred attitude‐consistent over counterattitudinal messages, which strengthened the political self‐concept through increased accessibility.     

Political Online Information Searching in Germany and the United States: Confirmation Bias,Source Credibility,and Attitude Impacts

Before the 2013 German federal election, 121 participants completed a 2‐session online study (which paralleled a U.S. study before the 2012 presidential election). They browsed online search results pertaining to 4 political issues while selective exposure was unobtrusively measured. In a 4 × 2 × 2 (topic × issue stance × source credibility) within‐subjects design, the search results indicated either issue support or opposition, associated with low‐ or high‐credibility sources. Hypotheses were derived from cognitive dissonance, approach‐avoidance, and motivated cognition models. Findings yielded a confirmation bias. Attitude‐consistent exposure uniformly reinforced attitudes; attitude‐discrepant exposure uniformly weakened attitudes. Analyses with parallel U.S. data showed a stronger confirmation bias in the United States than in Germany.     

Online Groups and Political Discourse: Do Online Discussion Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political Disagreement?

To what extent do online discussion spaces expose participants to political talk and to cross‐cutting political views in particular? Drawing on a representative national sample of over 1000 Americans reporting participation in chat rooms or message boards, we examine the types of online discussion spaces that create opportunities for cross‐cutting political exchanges. Our findings suggest that the potential for deliberation occurs primarily in online groups where politics comes up only incidentally, but is not the central purpose of the discussion space. We discuss the implications of our findings for the contributions of the Internet to cross‐cutting political discourse.     

The Flow of Digital News in a Network of Sources,Authorities, and Hubs

This article presents an analysis of the flow of information in a network of online news sites. Social network theory and research on hyperlinked networks of Web pages are used to develop a model of information flow among Web sites. Kleinberg's authority‐hub model is extended by introducing sources of information in the network. Significant support was found for a Source–Authority–Hub model, which shows the source, directionality, routing, and destination of news information flow through a network of authorities and hubs. This model demonstrates the ability of key Web sites to control the flow of news and information. Applications of the model to over‐time data have the potential to predict future changes in the online news industry.     

Who Taught Me That? Repurposed News,Blog Structure,and Source Identification

Changes in the information society, especially the rise of blogs, have refocused attention on questions of media modality, source identification, and motivation in online environments. We manipulate the structure of a blogger's critique on a news story (global vs. interspersed) and the partisan target of the blogger (Democrats vs. Republicans) in an experiment embedded in an online survey. Our results support our expectations: The more difficult story format decreases the ability of less motivated readers to correctly identify the source of their information, without affecting the motivated. These effects of structure on source identification are democratically consequential when people rely on blogs for facts about public affairs without the proper cautionary caveats regarding the credibility of the source.     

To Your Health: Self‐Regulation of Health Behavior Through Selective Exposure to Online Health Messages

Reaching target audiences is of crucial importance for the success of health communication campaigns, but individuals may avoid health messages if they challenge their beliefs or behaviors. A lab study (N = 419) examined effects of messages' consistency with participants' behavior and source credibility on selective exposure for 4 health lifestyle topics. Drawing on self‐regulation theory and dissonance theory, 3 motivations were examined: self‐bolstering, self‐motivating, and self‐defending. Prior behavior predicted selective exposure across topics, reflecting self‐bolstering. Standard‐behavior discrepancies also affected selective exposure, consistent with self‐motivating rather than self‐defending. Selective exposure to high‐credibility sources advocating for organic food, fruits and vegetable consumption, exercise, and limiting coffee all fostered accessibility of related standards, whereas messages from low‐credibility sources showed no such impact.     

Selective Exposure and Reinforcement of Attitudes and Partisanship Before a Presidential Election

Right before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, this 2‐session online field study examined consequences of selective exposure to political messages on accessibility of attitudes and of partisanship. In the first session, participants indicated attitudes toward political issues and their partisanship, which allowed measuring accessibility of attitudes and of partisanship. In the second session, participants browsed articles. Four issues were covered by 8 articles, with 2 articles featuring opposing perspectives. Selective exposure was unobtrusively logged. Finally, participants completed measures for attitudes and partisanship again. Selective exposure to attitude‐consistent articles was linked to greater attitude accessibility. The indirect impact of selective exposure on partisanship accessibility through attitude accessibility was significant.     

Effect of Contact Information on the Credibility of Online Health Information

This study analyzed the effects of publisher contact information on the credibility of online health information. Participants $({rm n}$ = 144) rated the credibility of webpages with a “Contact Us” link more highly than pages that had no contact information. Other types of contact information (street addresses and email links) did not significantly affect the credibility ratings. Qualitative results indicate that the “Contact Us” link served as a peripheral cue to credibility, rather than triggering conscious analysis. This paper also discusses how the effectiveness of credibility cues can vary according to reader characteristics.      

The perceived importance of credibility cues for the assessment of the trustworthiness of online information by visitors of health-related websites: The role of individual factors

The varying quality of information available on the internet has increased the need for the assessment of the trustworthiness of online information. This need can be even more pressing in the consideration of information that has the potential to harm one’s health. This study examined the perceived importance of credibility cues for the assessment of the trustworthiness of online information among visitors of websites focused on nutrition, dieting, and fitness. Using cross-sectional survey data from 695 Czech respondents aged 13–62 (84% females), four credibility components were identified. The most important for the assessment of trustworthiness was reported as the surface component, followed by external sources, author-oriented component, and feedback. An examination of the links with individual factors showed that the perceived importance of these components was linked to demographics, online experiences, and the motivation for visiting the websites. The surface component was more important for women and those with the motivation to lose weight; external sources were more important for those with higher education, author-oriented component was more important for those who are more active online and who have motivation to lose weight and improve their health; and feedback was more important for visitors with weight-loss motivation. The findings are discussed with regard to the role of diverse credibility cues for trustworthiness assessment, inter-individual differences, and the implications for praxis.     

Politically Motivated Reinforcement Seeking: Reframing the Selective Exposure Debate

This article seeks to reframe the selective exposure debate by demonstrating that people exhibit a preference for opinion‐reinforcing political information without systematically avoiding opinion challenges. The results are based on data collected in a national random‐digit‐dial telephone survey (n = 1,510) conducted prior to the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Analyses show that Americans use the control afforded by online information sources to increase their exposure to opinions consistent with their own views without sacrificing contact with other opinions. This observation contradicts the common assumption that reinforcement seeking and challenge avoidance are intrinsically linked aspects of the selective exposure phenomenon. This distinction is important because the consequences of challenge avoidance are significantly more harmful to democratic deliberation than those of reinforcement seeking.     

A fault‐tolerant group key agreement protocol exploiting dynamic setting

A fault‐tolerant group key agreement is an essential infrastructure for Internet communication among all involved participants; it can establish a secure session key no matter how many malicious participants exit simultaneously in an effort to disrupt the key agreement process. Recently, Zhao et al. proposed an efficient fault‐tolerant group key agreement protocol named efficient group key agreement that can resist denial‐of‐service attacks, reply attacks, man‐in‐middle attacks, and common modulus attacks; it can also preserve forward secrecy with lower computational cost than previous protocols. We show that it is still vulnerable to active attacks by malicious participants and modify the corresponding security weakness adaptively. Furthermore, we propose an efficient fault‐tolerant group key agreement based on a binary tree structure and enhance it to a dynamic setting where participants can leave or join the group arbitrarily according to their preferences with instant session key refreshment. Additionally, our session key refreshment is based on secure key updating to protect forward/backward confidentiality and is resistant to active/passive attacks. The performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol has lower computational cost and little additional communication cost exploiting dynamic setting. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Helpful or Harmful? How Frequent Repetition Affects Perceived Statement Credibility

On the basis of experimental data, we study how repetition of a statement affects perceived statement credibility. We identify 2 counteracting effects: The first effect, known as “truth effect,” describes a positive relationship between repetition and statement credibility. People tend to ascribe higher credibility to messages that they repeatedly encounter. In contrast, the second effect occurs when repetition is taken too far. Here, an indirect and negative effect is identified and participants start to perceive the message as a persuasive attempt. This perception triggers reactance, which in turn considerably reduces participants' trust in the source and leads to a significant decrease in the overall credibility of the message. Our results broaden the understanding of the benefits and harms of repeated persuasive messages.     

Social Media and the Activist Toolkit: User Agreements,Corporate Interests,and the Information Infrastructure of Modern Social Movements

The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere have been credited in part to the creative use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet the information policies of the firms behind social media can inhibit activists and empower authoritarian regimes. Analysis of Facebook's response to Egypt's “We Are All Khaled Said” group, YouTube's policy exemption for videos coming from Syria, Moroccan loyalist response to the online presence of atheists, and the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army illustrate how prohibitions on anonymity, community policing practices, campaigns from regime loyalists, and counterinsurgency tactics work against democracy advocates. These problems arise from the design and governance challenges facing large‐scale, revenue‐seeking social media enterprises.     

Exploring the effects of specialist versus generalist embodied virtual agents in a multi-product category online store

Embodied virtual agents have been increasingly implemented in e-commerce websites to provide a more natural, social, and engaging way to deliver product information to online shoppers. The media equation theory posits that users’ responses to computer agents adhere to human-to-human social rules; hence, effective designs of embodied virtual agents should be based upon social psychology rules. One such rule is the notion of specialisation. While the concept of media specialisation in terms of TVs, computers, websites, web agents, smartphones, and voice assistants have been examined; no studies have yet to explore the effects of specialists and generalist embodied virtual agents in a multi-product category online store. To bridge this research gap, an experiment was conducted in which university undergraduates (n?=?132) were randomly divided to interact with either a multi-product category website that incorporated specialist virtual agents or a multi-product category website that deployed a generalist virtual agent. Consistent with the hypotheses of this study, it was shown that the use of specialist virtual agents (as compared to a generalist virtual agent) enhanced perceptions of agent expertise, information credibility, website trust (ability, benevolence, integrity), and purchase intention. Meditation analyses revealed that the effects of agent specialisation on purchase intention were mediated by perceived virtual agent expertise, perceived information credibility, and website trust (ability, benevolence, integrity). Finally, the effects of agent specialisation were shown to be more evident for females than for males. Theoretical and practical implications related to virtual agent specialisation in the context of multi-product category online stores are discussed in this paper.     

French Abstract

To what extent do frame‐building and frame‐setting processes manifest themselves in the interplay between online public discourse and traditional (offline) media discourse? Employing a content analysis of 206 online posts and 114 news reports regarding a sociopolitical incident in China, we test the associations and causal relationships between the salience of opinion frames and media frames. Online public opinion plays an important role in transforming the original local event into a nationally prominent issue. It also exerts a significant frame‐building impact on subsequent media reports but only in the early stage of coverage. However, the media are not passive in this two‐way process and adapt online frames as necessary. Although media coverage is the primary source of information for netizens, it does not set frames for online discourse. Noticeably, significant associations between concurrent opinion frames and media frames lend strong support to frame‐interacting effects. Discussion focuses on governmental influences in the frame‐building process and the potential of netizen autonomy to attenuate frame‐setting effects.     

An efficient pairing‐free identity‐based authenticated group key agreement protocol

An authenticated group key agreement protocol allows participants to agree on a group key that will be subsequently used to provide secure group communication over an insecure network. In this paper, we give a security analysis on a pairing‐free identity‐based authenticated group key agreement because of Islam et al. We show that the protocol of Islam et al. cannot satisfy the minimal security requirements of the key agreement protocols. We propose an efficient pairing‐free identity‐based authenticated group key agreement for imbalanced mobile network. The proposed protocol can be implemented easily for practical application in mobile networks as it is free from bilinear. Under the difficulty of the InvCDH and CDH we demonstrate that the proposed protocol provides perfect forward secrecy, implicit key authentication and the dynamic functionality. As compared with the group key agreement protocols for imbalanced mobile network, the proposed protocol provides stronger security properties and high efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Does Insightful and Emotional Disclosure Bring Potential Health Benefits? Study Based on Online Support Groups for Women With Breast Cancer

Building upon 2 theoretical models (the cognitive adaptation model and the emotional exposure–habituation model), this research focused on 2 aspects of disclosure content—insights and emotions—and examined how women with breast cancer benefit from written disclosure in online support groups. Using survey data collected at baseline and after 4 months and messages posted in bulletin‐board‐type online groups in between, we analyzed how the content of disclosive messages predicted health outcomes. Disclosure of insights led to greater improvements in health self‐efficacy, emotional well‐being, and functional well‐being, which was mediated by lowered breast cancer concerns. Disclosure of negative emotions had no main effects on health outcomes, but weakened the unfavorable association between concerns at baseline and functional well‐being at follow‐up.