Trovärdig nyhetskonsumtion på Instagram; Influencers påverkan på unga vuxna

Sammanfattning: This study examined the topic of growing news consumption on Instagram and the impact that could have on the spread of misinformation. The purpose was to establish if there was an issue with news being mixed into a platform with Swedish influencers. Furthermore, the study aimed to examine whether young adults were faced with risks when consuming news on Instagram.  An experiment was conducted in order to research if influencers liking posts were able to further mislead young adults. The experiment occurred in a web survey where 196 respondents participated. Respondents were exposed to a fabricated health related news post about vaccinating against covid-19. Comparing the result of those who saw the stimuli and those who only saw the unliked news post, resulted in indications that influencers were able to further mislead young adults. Spearmans rank correlation showed a significant correlation, 0.289'', between source-credibility and message-credibility. The influencers did not need to have an expertise in the area of health. Nonetheless, they could still increase the trustworthiness to health-related news by approximately 29% as indicated by the results. In order to protect young adults from misleading news, Instagram needs to separate influencers from public health news. In addition, influencers need to be informed that their social media post interactions could produce consequences. Further research could be qualitative, finding out reasons behind the social validation. Furthermore, future research could categorize the influencers investigated.