Most people will tell you they don’t trust social media as a source of news. Survey after survey shows Americans view platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as far less reliable than national newspapers, local news, or even their own family members. Yet when a scandal about a company goes viral on these same platforms, the fallout can be swift and severe, tanking sales, sinking stock prices, and forcing public apologies.
So how can a channel that people distrust still cause so much damage to brands? That question motivated a new investigation published in the Journal of Business Research by Scott Connors of Western University and Sean T. Hingston of Toronto Metropolitan University. Their answer centers on a specific type of content: news about companies behaving in ways that strike us as morally wrong.
The credibility gap and what can close it
Connors, the lead author, set out to examine what researchers call the “social media credibility gap.” This refers to the gap between how believable people find news on social media versus news from traditional outlets. A pilot analysis using data from the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, covering nearly 12,000 U.S. adults, confirmed the pattern. Social media ranked as the least trusted source of news, scoring well below national news, local news, and even leaders and officials. The gap held steady across political affiliations.
But the researchers suspected this skepticism might not apply evenly. They proposed that when a brand’s alleged wrongdoing violates a person’s moral values, something shifts in how that person evaluates the message. Drawing on decades of research into moral psychology, they argued that moral reactions tend to be intuitive and fast. After feeling that an action is wrong, people often look for ways to justify that feeling. If the information came from a source they’d normally doubt, they may adjust their view of the source rather than discard their moral reaction.
Psychologists call this “motivated moral reasoning.” To understand the idea, imagine seeing a post claiming a company discriminated against job applicants because of their race. If you find that morally offensive, admitting the post might be unreliable would undercut your reaction. Raising your estimate of the post’s credibility keeps your moral response intact.
Testing the idea across multiple studies
To test this reasoning, the team ran three main studies plus two preregistered replications. In each, participants read what looked like a news story about a company, presented either as a post from a news outlet’s Facebook page or as an article on a news website. The content and wording were kept identical; only the channel changed.
In the first study, 227 liberal-leaning American adults read about one of two incidents involving an electronics company. One version described discriminatory hiring, denying candidates job offers because of their sexual orientation. This counted as a moral transgression. The other version described frequent product glitches due to poor quality control, a non-moral transgression. Participants then rated how credible they found the story.
The results matched the researchers’ prediction. For the product glitch story, participants rated the Facebook version as less credible than the news website version, the expected credibility gap. But for the discrimination story, participants rated both channels as equally credible. The social media penalty vanished when the content involved a moral violation. A pretest confirmed the two stories did not differ in how negative they seemed or how much they aligned with participants’ prior beliefs, ruling out those explanations.
Two replications using different moral transgressions, such as racial hiring discrimination and worker mistreatment, and different platforms, including Twitter, produced similar results. Additional analyses also ruled out the possibility that moral transgressions simply seemed more severe or that participants spent more time reading them.
From credibility to outrage to revenge
The second study held the transgression constant and measured how morally wrong each participant personally found it. Among 235 adults, the more morally wrong someone judged the discriminatory hiring story, the more credible they found the Facebook post. That increase in credibility was linked to stronger feelings of outrage. The pattern held even when accounting for how severe, diagnostic, or reputationally threatening participants considered the incident.
The third study used political orientation as a tool. Research on moral foundations has found that liberals tend to moralize issues of fairness and harm, while conservatives focus more on values like loyalty, authority, and purity. The team presented 209 participants across the political spectrum with the discrimination story on either Facebook or a news site. Among more conservative participants, who were less likely to view the incident as a moral violation, the usual credibility gap appeared. Among more liberal participants, who were more likely to see it as morally wrong, the gap disappeared.
A further analysis traced a chain of events: more liberal political orientation was linked to higher perceived credibility of the social media post, which was linked to greater moral outrage, which was linked to a stronger desire for revenge against the brand. The desire for revenge, in past research, has predicted behaviors like boycotting, negative word of mouth, and aggressive complaints.
What this means for businesses
For companies, the findings suggest that the low trust many people report in social media offers limited protection. When a story aligns with the moral values of a brand’s target audience, the usual skepticism weakens, and reactions can escalate quickly. This applies even to claims that turn out to be false, as the authors note with examples like viral conspiracy theories about Wayfair and Dasani.
The authors suggest that political orientation can help companies anticipate which incidents will register as moral violations for their audience. They also suggest that response strategies may work better when they directly address the moral value that was violated, rather than offering a generic apology.
The researchers note some limits. They focused on transgressions involving fairness, which resonates more with liberal audiences, and did not test violations tied to loyalty, authority, or purity. They also measured credibility of a single message rather than overall trust in social media as a platform, leaving open the question of whether repeated exposure could shift broader perceptions over time.
