From News Literacy to Skepticism: Examining the Pathways That Shape the “News-Finds-Me” Perception

2026/05/31 by Ying Xiong, Xu Zhang · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Educational Strategies and Epistemologies #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Social Media and Politics

paper · doi:10.1177/10776990261447246

openalex publication_date 2026/05/31 · openalex created_date 2026/06/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/01

Abstract

Guided by motivated reasoning theory, this study examines how news literacy impacts individuals’ news-finds-me (NFM) perception in the social media environment through a dual-process: identity-motivated skepticism and accuracy-motivated skepticism. Using a structural equation modeling approach with representative samples from the United States, this study’s results revealed that news literacy affected the NFM perception through two distinct skepticism pathways. The findings of this study advance understanding of how news literacy operates through two underlying mechanisms to shape individuals’ NFM perception in an algorithm-based news environment, offering theoretical and practical implications.

Citations

• A new criterion for assessing discriminant validity in variance-based structural equation modeling
• Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs
• The case for motivated reasoning.
• Motivated Reasoning and Public Opinion Perception
• The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics
• Experiencing Algorithms: How Young People Understand, Feel About, and Engage With Algorithmic News Selection on Social Media
• Reporting reliability, convergent and discriminant validity with structural equation modeling: A review and best-practice recommendations
• Algorithmic media use and algorithm literacy: An integrative literature review

Discussions

• A new study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly finds that #NewsLiteracy helps lower the perception of not seeking news/feeling informed and also reliance on algorithms to acquire news. But a [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

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