Abstract:

Research on adolescents' trust in news media reveals complex patterns: several studies suggest that traditional media channels remain the most trusted (Melro & Pereira, 2023), others point out that trust in internet news sources has increased to the detriment of traditional media (Muller et al., 2023). Despite recognizing the importance of reliable news, many adolescents often perceive news as boring, repetitive, and disconnected from youth (Tamboer et al., 2020), and increasingly tend to inform themselves through social media (Russmann & Hess, 2020).

However, many studies have highlighted the risks of using social media as the main source of information. Amongst the others, Sormanen et al. (2022) observe that many adolescents are passive social media news consumers, encountering news incidentally rather than actively seeking it. Nygren & Guath (2018) indicate that many teenagers struggle to determine the credibility of news sources, including false, biased, and vetted news. Millet et al. (2024) observe that collective social endorsement and source credibility influence users' perceptions of post credibility on social media. Finally, Corbu et al. (2022) highlight that despite apparent digital literacy, adolescents often have trouble assessing the accuracy and trustworthiness of the information they encounter.

Particularly important to the aim of this paper is the study conducted by Park et al. (2020), who found that increased social media use for accessing news resulted in a decline in trust in news media generally, indicating a negative impact of social media on news trust.

The construct of trust fit the activities carried out under the project "TASKs: Trust, Authority, Sense and Knowledge", funded by NextGenerationEU.

The project aims at analyzing interactions of journalism and journalists with citizens and media users, in light of changes that have been happening in the contemporary media ecosystem, where platforms govern interactions between news providers, content and users. In particular, TASKs monitors and assesses the entire process of communication through a triangulation of news providers’ performances and role perceptions, citizens’ and audience’s expectations and performances, and (platformed) journalistic news contents. The assumption is that within the platformized media ecosystem, media trust and journalistic authority cannot be evaluated anymore just by considering news organizations’ and journalists’ performances; conversely, media users’ perspective and the mediating role of platforms should be considered. To provide systematic and empirically-based insights on news media trust and journalistic authority, TASKs adopts an innovative multi-method approach that combines qualitative and quantitative research methods with AI-based techniques to analyse large-scale data. TASKs enriches the existing literature by combining users’ perspective with both journalists’ self-representations and news products. Finally, the project goes beyond the traditional focus on journalism as an institution, paying also attention to platform dependent news channels, which are potentially involved in the exchange between trust, authority, sense and knowledge.

Our paper aims to demonstrate how the results of the TASKs project become extremely important to inform improved media literacy education and strategies to increase adolescents' motivation for engaging with news content, particularly working on the development of the trust construct.

Keywords:

Social media literacy, Artificial Intelligence, journalism, trust building.