Building resilience: The influence of the format on the effectiveness of news literacy messages

Although academic interest in news literacy messages (NLM) has grown, many questions about them remain unresolved. First, it remains unclear how the format of the NLM influences its effectiveness. Second, we still know little about their long-term effectiveness. To answer these questions, this study conducted a two-wave experiment in Belgium. We compared NLMs in the format of a text, an infographic, and video. We also manipulated elements in the false news article that participants had to evaluate. Our findings show that NLMs are effective and that the effects remain over a middle-long period of two weeks. Second, we find that on the short-term infographics are less effective than NLMs in the format of a text or video. In the middle-long term only videos have a significant effect. Lastly, we find suggestive evidence that NLMs work partly because people take over their recommendations, although here we find no differences between formats.