Understanding How Readers Determine the Legitimacy of Online News Articles in the Era of Fake News

Internet users are routinely exposed to fake news in their social media feeds. The main goal of this paper is to identify the factors readers consider important in discriminating against fake news from true news when reading an online news article. We design and conduct three surveys using Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify the top factors and rate them under diverse scenarios. Our results suggest that people perceive news Source and Content to be the most important factors, in general, to distinguish fake news from true news, however, their importance reduces in practice when people actually read a news article. Furthermore, the importance of different factors in the credibility determination of a news article varies with people's political leanings. Our work is the first of its kind and offers new insights into how people determine the legitimacy of online news articles.