Content Matters: The Role of Deepfake Content in Shaping News Credibility and Engagement

This paper investigates the impact of deepfake content on news credibility and user engagement with news on social media platforms. Building on existing literature that highlights platforms’ second-order effect on news credibility and engagement with the news content, we address the emerging challenge of deepfakes, particularly distinguishing between disinformative and entertaining deepfake content. Through an online experiment involving 334 participants, we examine how deepfakes content affects users’ perceptions of news credibility and their engagement with news. We further investigate the mediating role of deepfake plausibility on this effect. Preliminary findings reveal that the presence of deepfakes with disinformative content negatively impacts news credibility. Conversely, the overall impact of disinformative deepfakes on engagement is positive since the direct negative effect of the deepfake content is smaller than the positive effect of deepfake plausibility. Our work contributes in understanding the second-order effects of digital platforms on news consumption and provides insights for platform managers and policymakers on mitigating the risks posed by deepfake technology.