Abstract
Chatbots are a burgeoning opportunity for news media outlets to disseminate their content in a conversational way, and create an engaging experience around it. Since chatbots are social and interactive technologies, they might be effective tools to lower the threshold of engaging with news content containing opposing views. In an experiment, we test this idea by investigating whether people are more likely to accept a news article containing conflicting views when it is delivered by a chatbot, as compared with the same article on a news website. The results indicated that people agreed more to a counter-attitudinal news article when it was delivered by a news chatbot (compared with the website article). In addition, users also perceived this chatbot article as more credible. The underlying process for this effect was that people attributed human-like characteristics to the chatbot on an implicit level (i.e., perceived mindless anthropomorphism). These results are discussed in the light of their potential contribution to an informed public discourse and a decrease in polarization in our society.
Highlights
In recent years, computational and automatization processes have been installed in many areas of online mass communication, including news media outlets
We focus on the credibility effects that such news stories have on online users: do users evaluate a chatbot-delivered counter-attitudinal news article as more credible than when it is provided on a news website? we test whether perceived anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human-like qualities to chatbots, serves as the underlying mechanism in these relationships
It was found that the chatbot had significantly lower scores for mindful anthropomorphism
Summary
Computational and automatization processes have been installed in many areas of online mass communication, including news media outlets. Chatbots are conversational agents that are programmed to communicate with people through natural language, and when requested, can automatically provide news content and updates to the user (Zarouali et al, 2018). Such chatbots are typically integrated in private messaging applications, such as Facebook Messenger. BBC actively tries to leverage bot technology using chatbots on various messaging platforms (e.g., Facebook, Telegram, etc.) to increase audience reach and automate their news coverage on social media (BBC News Labs, 2019)
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