Do Youth Trust in Political News on Social Media? Impacts of Trust or Distrust on the Egyptian Young Citizens Political Engagement

This study examines to what degree youth trust political news on social media as it is an important political communication platform. The study used standard attitudinal online survey questions to assess interest in politics, sources of getting political news, trusting attitudes, and online political engagement activities. The online survey was conducted on a sample of young citizens (n= 225, age 18 to 35 years). Findings reveal the importance of social media as a political information source for young people, however, trustworthy of political information has been discovered to be low. Youth has less trust in political information sources on social media, other citizens, and political institutions. Though, young citizens have also less trust in political news in the traditional media, surprisingly it is higher than trustworthy of social media. Mistrust attitudes predict distrusting behaviors, such as disengagement of societal or political activities as a reflection of political cynicism. Results confirm also, distrust leads to less interest to interact with other net users and a decline of social and political engagement. Trust in political news on social media alters when the public are of different age education, gender, and economic status. In addition, Regression analysis shows that trust in political information on social media is correlated to six predictor variables in the model: trust in traditional media, trust in government, trust in others, political engagement, gender, and the family economic status. These results shed a light on the need of improving the quality of online political news on social media as it seems to be a vital component of the virtual public sphere. It is plausible to assume that declining political news credibility and increasing mistrust of political news online sources confirmed by this study might negatively impact the public discourse, social capital and, potentially harm democratic transition.