Combating Disinformation or Reinforcing Cognitive Bias: Effect of Weibo Poster’s Location Disclosure

Abstract

This study conducted a controlled experiment to examine the impact of posters’ IP disclosure on the perceptions of Weibo users with different habits and information preferences and explore whether such disclosure facilitates the fight against disinformation or deepens cognitive biases. Results showed that the IP location of the information poster does influence users’ judgments of the authenticity of the information and that the consistency between users’ long-term residence and poster IP is not important for users to make judgments about the credibility of information. The high level of usage of Weibo also has no effect on users’ judgment of the credibility of the information, and this may be related to the small difference in college students’ overall use of Weibo. The results also showed that users’ perceptions of information’s accuracy, logical coherence, absence of bias, alignment with their own views, consistency with the majority opinion, and trustworthiness of its source are all statistically positively correlated with the overall credibility of information.