TRUST ONLINE: Visual Cues for Trustworthy News

Abstract: This study was born in the light of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency’s (MSB) release of a handbook on how to counter information influence activities, along with a growing distrust placed upon media outlets by the public. The purpose of this experiment was to test knowledge from earlier research in the e-commerce domain on what makes a website perceived as trustworthy but applied and tested on images of news articles. Participants (n = 53) read eight manipulated images of articles from theguardian.com where the articles either had an associated image vs. no image, had comments vs. no comments and lastly, the domain suffix had its original .com vs. the fictitious .biz. The study was designed as an incomplete 2 x 2 x 2 within-group experiment, the results showed no statistically significant interac-tion or main effects for any condition. This means that the hypothesis of the inclu-sion of images, comments, and .com would all have a combined and individual trust-inducing effect can’t be confirmed and conclude that the features of trustwor-thiness in an e-commerce website might be different from a news article.