In social media’s flood of information, all facts appear equal. Except they’re not. According to new research, having the news in your feed makes you better at telling the difference.

In a new study, people who were encouraged to follow mainstream news organizations on Instagram and WhatsApp were better at identifying true from false news stories. News followers were also more aware of important events and had more trust in news media and journalists. The study was just published in Nature Human Behaviour.

“Our findings suggest that promoting factual and verified news content can make users more resilient to misinformation and disinformation,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor of communication in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis and a corresponding author on the study. “This calls into question the decisions made by some social-media platforms to minimize news reach.”

Increasing quality in social media streams

Social media platforms have been charged with spreading misleading and even dangerous content that has eroded trust in institutions and democracy. This new study tested the impact of increasing exposure to quality, fact-checked content that is already abundant on social media from mainstream news organizations.

This field experiment, which took place in March 2024, included 3,395 WhatsApp or Instagram users in France and Germany. The research team divided the participants into two groups. The treatment group followed additional mainstream news organization accounts, and the control group followed accounts on cooking, movies or art.

Every participant was asked to follow two accounts, to activate notifications, and to upload screenshots of the followed accounts to the research team to verify compliance. The news organization accounts existed alongside all other social media content that the study already participants followed.

Benefits from news people didn’t know was there

The study found that encouraging people to follow mainstream news organizations increased their knowledge of current affairs and the accuracy of their beliefs about political issues and events. It also increased their awareness of true news stories as well as overall trust in the news, in journalists and in news organizations.

Some participants reported not knowing that news was freely available on social media. This was particularly true among WhatsApp users, as many people use the platform only for one-to-one messaging.

A surprising finding was that access to fact-checked news in itself seemed to build people’s skills in telling the difference between accurate and inaccurate information. Despite the study including no efforts to reduce the volume of potentially misleading or inaccurate content, seeing a few posts from mainstream news organizations improved people’s belief accuracy.

“Encouraging exposure to verified information from news media could be more effective than reducing exposure to low-quality information from junk news,” said Wojcieszak.

Building long-term trust in mainstream news

The researchers found lasting demand for mainstream news media even after the study ended. Just over half of participants reported that they would continue following the news accounts. This result adds to recent evidence from other studies finding that people want more educational and informative content on social media.

Adding content from verified sources is also unlikely to decrease engagement. In a separate study, Wojcieszak has found that increasing recommendations to verified and factual news videos on YouTube does not decrease the users’ time on and engagement with the platform. Encouraging people to follow the social media accounts of mainstream news media could also be as simple as targeted ads and other forms of outreach to let people know they are available.

The researchers said that these results call into question the decisions of social media platforms to reduce the reach of and downrank mainstream news media. For example, it has been widely reported that reach for content from news outlets is being hobbled on Facebook and Instagram. Those platforms’ parent company Meta also announced in January it was getting rid of fact checkers.

“Our findings show the potential of putting good information in these important online ecosystems,” said Wojcieszak. “It’s a way to disrupt informational silos and bolster the resilience of democratic societies.”