Just a few social media posts can lead people to form strong, lasting opinions on topics they know nothing about and crucially, those opinions are largely unaffected by whether the information is true or false.
According to a study published in May by researchers from Trinity Business School in Ireland and NEOMA Business School in France, after seeing as few as three to five consistent social media posts, users formed an initial opinion that stabilised rapidly, with additional information having little further influence.
Researchers carried out their experiments on US-based participants, exposing them to Instagram-style posts on news topics with which they were not familiar.
"We found that the most trusted source people have is a celebrity expert, that combination," Professor Ashish Kumar Jha from Trinity Business School told Euronews' fact-checking team, The Cube. "So if there's a celebrity doctor, someone who is a White House advisor and has millions of followers and is a doctor."
The second most trusted social media sources identified by researchers were celebrities, and finally, people who had professional titles in their biographies, such as "Dr."
