A comparative study on credibility judgement of news related tweets between academic and non-academic young adults

Abstract: For many young adults, retrieving information and news from the internet is not an uncommon task. A large portion of said information is shared through social media. However, social media is not always a reliant news source, due to the fact that the content is largely crowdsourced. One of the social media and micro-blogging services is Twitter. Twitter allows anyone to share information about anything through messages called "tweets". This leads to fast propagation of news across the world. However, it lacks a filter to sort out false news. This thesis researches whether higher education has an impact on credibility judgement in young adults. The results show that overall, young academics are more prone to scepticism than non-academics regarding news relayed through a social media such as Twitter.