Tell Me What You Like and I Know What You Will Share: Topical Interest Influences Behavior Toward News From High and Low Credible Sources

Two of the major problems our society grapples with today are the aggressive collection and use of private data on digital platforms and the widespread dissemination of misleading information on these platforms. Personalizing online services based on private information, such as location and interests, has become the standard for many service providers, including news content providers. While personalizing digital news services can have some benefits, it can create multiple new attack surfaces that can be leveraged to fuel the propagation of misleading information, because content selection is optimized for engagement and not necessarily for quality and truthfulness. However, whether personalization can influence people's trust in the content, and their tendency to share this (potentially misleading) content with others remains unexamined. In this paper, we report findings from an online study (N =207), investigating whether an individual's topical interest and staying up-to-date on topics affect their belief in and sharing of news articles from low-credible and high-credible sources. In this experiment, we assessed participants' interest across a range of topics and selected articles on health and entertainment, from both low and high-credible sources. Our main finding shows that topical interest affects people's beliefs in and the sharing of health-related articles from both types of sources. Participants were also more likely to share articles that overlapped with their interest, regardless of source credibility, across both topics. We discuss the implications of these findings for the news ecosystem and the propagation of fake news.