A new study released on Wednesday shows that not all young adults believe information posted on Twitter.
Kimberly Fenn, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University (MSU), led the study, which is the first to look at possible connections between social media and "false memory", according to CBS News.
Studies in the past have shown that a story can be altered by false information given after the event. This situation plants what psychologists call false memories in the human brain. The researchers at MSU theorized that social media postings could lead some to experience this dilemma.
74 undergraduate students from the "Millennial Generation", with an average age of 19 participated in the study. Twitter is reportedly most popular among those aged 18 to 29, and is home to 230 million users, DNA India reported.
The students were shown images on a computer depicting a story about a man robbing a car. They were then presented with false information about the story in a scrolling text feed that appeared similar to Twitter and a feed from a more traditional online source.
The researchers said that 80 percent of Americans use the Internet, and that out of the 80 percent, more Americans receive their daily news from online sources and social media sites than from printed sources, CBS News reported.
The researchers discovered that the participants were less likely to form false memories about the story after reading the information from the Twitter-like feed, CBS News reported.
Fenn said the students appeared to not trust the Twitter-like feed as much as they trusted the more traditional source.
"Our findings indicate young people are somewhat wary of information that comes from Twitter. It's a good sign," she said. "We propose young adults are taking into account the medium of the message when integrating information into memory."
The study was published in a paper in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
