Brown Bag Seminar: Explaining Trust in Information Providers

We study how the characteristics of information providers impact the news consumers' perception of information quality. The characteristics of information providers are crucial in online news consumption because most information providers do not have a reputation, and interactions are primarily one-shot. We focus on the comparison between characteristics that can lead to statistical discrimination---education, for instance---and characteristics from which no inference about information quality should be possible ---such as gender and ethnicity. We plan to bring the experiment to the field---on TikTok---and study whether potential discrimination based on information providers' characteristics can impact the popularity of content and profiles on social media. The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) of the Republic of China (Taiwan) has awarded us a research grant for this project.