ArticlePloS one2025
Problematic social media use is associated with believing in and engaging with fake news.
Article in PloS one, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social media use is ubiquitous in our modern society, and some individuals display excessive, maladaptive use of these online platforms. This problematic social media use (PSMU) has been associated with greater impulsivity and risk-taking. Importantly, studies in healthy individuals have demonstrated that greater cognitive impulsivity is associated with a greater susceptibility to online "fake news." Therefore, we hypothesized that PSMU would be associated with believing in and engaging with fake news. To address this, we conducted an online, within-subject experiment in which participants (N=189; female=102, male=86, prefer not to disclose=1; mean age=19.8 years) completed a fake news task. This task presented participants with 20 news stories (10 real and 10 false, in random order) formatted as social media posts. We assessed participants' credibility judgments of these news posts, as well as participants' intentions to click, like, comment, and share these posts. We also assessed participants' degree of PSMU and then related this measure to their performance in our task. We conducted a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with a mixed model approach, and it revealed that the greater one's PSMU, the more one finds specifically false news credible. We also found that the greater one's PSMU, the greater one's engagement with news posts, agnostic to the type of content (real or false). Finally, we found that the greater one's PSMU, the greater one's intent to click on specifically false news. Our research demonstrates that individuals who experience the most distress and impairment in daily functioning from social media use are also the most susceptible to false information posted on social media. We discuss the clinical implications of our findings.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.