Many also struggled to identify

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For example, one participant described a news story shared with her that consisted of a screenshot of an Instagram post of a newspaper article, which she ultimately deemed trustworthy because of the newspaper's reputation, whereas "if these are messages that have been typed by someone, then I don't trust them." Many users fear scams via WhatsApp and are therefore reluctant to click on links that take them outside the platform, and most respondents have received false information via WhatsApp in the past the origin of news shared with them on WhatsApp, leading them to adopt a more skeptical approach to information in general, on or off the platform.


“On WhatsApp, not everyone is concerned about verifying 1000 mobile database information. So sometimes you get a lot of information from people who just read the headline of a news story and didn’t check it.” – Cristiana Google Unlike Facebook and WhatsApp, Google contains fewer explicit signals about what people think about the information they encounter there. In contrast, other features of the platform were particularly highlighted when users described how they consumed information there. Participants often referred to Google 's ranking of content as an important indicator of quality, typically preferring the top results over the others.