InformationPeople “Fly to Quality” News When Faced with Uncertainty
When information becomes a matter of life or death or is key to navigating economic uncertainty, as it has during the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears people turn to tried and true sources of information rather than iffy sites that have become increasingly part of the social media news diet in recent years.
When information becomes a matter of life or death or is key to navigating economic uncertainty, as it has during the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears people turn to tried and true sources of information rather than iffy sites that have become increasingly part of the social media news diet in recent years.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility, an interdisciplinary center at the School of Information, say this “flight to quality” is similar to the behavior people exhibit when financial markets are volatile.
“When financial markets get shaky, people move their money into gold or other investments that they perceive to be less risky,” said Paul Resnick, the Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information and director of the interdisciplinary center that developed a tool called the Iffy Quotient, which measures the fraction of the most popular URLs on Facebook and Twitter that come from iffy sites.
“During the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the U.S., there was apparently an analogous ‘flight to quality’ in the public’s attention allocation. People paid more attention to news from mainstream sites and less attention to iffy sites, at least if the URLs that were most shared on Facebook and Twitter provide any indication.”
For the Iffy Quotient, the most popular URLs each day are determined by NewsWhip, one of the center’s partners. Another partner, NewsGuard, provides the site ratings, with Media Bias/Fact Check ratings used for sites that are not rated by NewsGuard.
In late February, the researchers noticed a drop in the Iffy Quotient: fewer of the popular URLs on both Facebook and Twitter were coming from iffy sites. They decided to check whether there was an associated surge in sharing of articles from mainstream sources, which might be interpreted as a flight to quality in uncertain times.
To conduct the analysis of a “Mainstream Quotient,” they identified a set of 30 mainstream news sources. These were taken from a 2019 academic study on news source quality published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The list includes the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, NPR, PBS, Bloomberg, The Economist, Newsweek and more.
