Infotainment on Social Media: Effects of Narrative, Dynamic, and Interactive News Presentation on Perceived and Actual Knowledge

Abstract

News media companies increasingly create digital news content for Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, thereby blending information and entertainment. Infotainment can enhance learning but might also lead to an illusion of knowing. We explore how the use of dynamic, narrative, and interactive features in Instagram stories affects perceived and actual knowledge about news issues. Two preregistered experiments were conducted: Study 1 (N = 124) compared different versions of digital news stories, and Study 2 (N = 121) additionally included a newspaper article as a control condition. The results demonstrate that the inclusion of dynamic, narrative, and interactive features in digital news items does not foster entertainment experiences and has no direct effect on actual and perceived knowledge. In Study 1, we found that infotainment features can increase knowledge for individuals who are less involved in a news topic; however, this effect did not replicate in Study 2.