From News Literacy to Skepticism: Examining the Pathways That Shape the “News-Finds-Me” Perception

Guided by motivated reasoning theory, this study examines how news literacy impacts individuals’ news-finds-me (NFM) perception in the social media environment through a dual-process: identity-motivated skepticism and accuracy-motivated skepticism. Using a structural equation modeling approach with representative samples from the United States, this study’s results revealed that news literacy affected the NFM perception through two distinct skepticism pathways. The findings of this study advance understanding of how news literacy operates through two underlying mechanisms to shape individuals’ NFM perception in an algorithm-based news environment, offering theoretical and practical implications.