Investigating the Impact of Fluency Manipulations on Belief in Fake News on Social Media Platforms

The circulation of fake news on social media platforms is a major concern. This phenomenon is exacerbated by users' mindless and rapid scrolling through news feeds and the copious amounts of information that users are exposed to on social media platforms. Although judgement is accompanied by a variety of subjective experiences such as fluency, research on fake news on social media has largely strayed away from understanding the role of these experiences on the perception of fake news. To address this gap, we propose a NeuroIS approach to investigate how two manipulations of fluency: (i) time constraint and (ii) information overload, impact users' belief in fake news on social media. We also aim to uncover the neural mechanisms by which these manipulations impact truth judgements, which may shed light on the mechanisms by which fake news become entrenched and assist in combatting the fake news proliferation we are witnessing today.