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. Many also struggled to identify 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 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.” – , 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 twitter data important indicator of quality, typically preferring the top results over the others.
For example, for Sukumar: “ It’s a priority to find something at the top of the list. But you tend to go down based on your time and interest in the topic in question .” For some users, Google rankings are viewed with distrust and skepticism about the way the search engine chooses search results, which may have commercial interests. Respondents often described information on Google as more trustworthy than on other platforms. This favorable perception of Google 's trustworthiness is rather related to the way Google allows users to easily compare multiple sources of information at once: “Well, Google has a lot of different news outlets, so… in that sense, I think it’s like Apple News, which has a lot of different news outlets, so I think it’s good to have, yeah, it’s good to read a range of things because you can get a more balanced view.