This Tweet Brought to You by a Journalist: How Comment Gatekeeping Influences Online News Credibility

It is increasingly common for journalists to use reader comments from social media as a quote or source of evidence for news. Past work on the effects of user-generated content has revealed that comments can have a host of negative effects on readers’ psychological processing of news, particularly when reader comments are hostile or uncivil. What happens, however, when online comments are moderated by a journalist? Does comment gatekeeping influence the effects of comments? Informed by the Modality-Agency-Interactivity-Navigability model and warranting theory, an experiment ( N = 365) was conducted to answer these questions using a 2 (comment gatekeeping: low vs. high) × 2 (comment valence: positive vs. negative) × 2 (news involvement: low vs. high) design. Results revealed that journalistic gatekeeping of comments decreases article credibility and increases bias through the indirect pathway of source trustworthiness, regardless of news type or comment valence.