The Factuality of News on Twitter According to Digital Qualified Audiences: Expectations, Perceptions, and Divergences with Journalism Considerations

Academic Editor: Andreu Casero-Ripollés Received: 30 October 2024 Revised: 30 November 2024 Accepted: 28 December 2024 Published: 1 January 2025 Citation: Rojas Torrijos, J. L., & Garrote Fuentes, Á. (2025). The Factuality of News on Twitter According to Digital Qualified Audiences: Expectations, Perceptions, and Divergences with Journalism Considerations. Journalism and Media,6(1), 3. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/journalmedia6010003 Copyright: © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). Article The Factuality of News on Twitter According to Digital Qualified Audiences: Expectations, Perceptions, and Divergences with Journalism Considerations JoséLuis Rojas Torrijos 1,* and Álvaro Garrote Fuentes 2 1Department of Journalism II, Faculty of Communication Studies, University of Seville, 41092 Sevilla, Spain 2College of Europe in Natolin, 02-797 Warsaw, Poland; [email protected] *Correspondence: jlr[email protected] Abstract: This research analyzes to what extent qualified digital audiences perceive, understand, and value the factuality of news published by news media within a communicative ecosystem where unverified information proliferates on social media. Additionally, it examines which factors may influence what highly educated and critically capable information audiences expect to find when consuming journalism. A qualitative, comparative study was conducted from a sample obtained of the ten most relevant statements on socio-political topics with the highest number of interactions published on the Twitter (X) accounts of six European digital and legacy media (Médiapart and Le Monde, France; Tortoise and The Guardian, United Kingdom; El Diario.es and El País, Spain), along with their reflection and development on the respective websites. With an expanded analytical scope to 300 tweet-news items (n= 300), two in-person focus groups were held at the College of Europe in Natolin (Poland) with postgraduate students from nine countries to assess their perception of the degree of truthfulness, bias, quality, and credibility of the displayed information. The results indicate that young, qualified digital audiences feel secure and capable of detecting any disinformation disorder. They value the variety of mentioned and verifiable sources, the presence of expert voices, and data-based claims as key elements in constructing credible media narratives. Keywords: factuality; disinformation; Twitter; digital audiences; journalism 1. Introduction False stories conceived and distributed across various digital platforms are often perceived by audiences as genuine news. The multiplicity of actors and sources in the current communicative ecosystem, along with 24-h information flows and the accelerated production rhythms on social media, prompt media to publish quickly without adequate verification (Rosenberg & Feldman,2008), thereby increasing misinformation among increasingly fragmented audiences who find it progressively challenging not only to distinguish falsehood from truth but also to differentiate factuality from speculation and opinion within statements. In this regard, several studies by the Pew Research Center (2018) and the Reuters Institute (2021) indicate that the problem lies not only in media verification but also in public expectations, valuation, and reading comprehension. Although the academic literature has already extensively addressed considerations of what journalism is and how it should act to differentiate itself from other content creators in the current digital landscape (Hanitzsch & Vos,2018;Truyens & Picone,2021;Pérez Curiel et al.,2021), this conceptual review of journalism’s norms and roles has almost always Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia6010003 Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 2 of 18 been conducted from the perspective of production rather than reception. Consequently, discrepancies arise between how professionals conceive their practice (Mellado & Van Dalen,2013) and how audiences, especially younger ones, perceive that performance in terms of what can be considered top-quality journalistic work (Weaver et al.,2007; Costera-Meijer,2007). For all these reasons, this study aims to analyze whether the concept of factuality, as the foundation for constructing verified news facts (Kovach & Rosenstiel,2014) that distinguish them from rumors and hoaxes (C. Silverman,2015), remains relevant in the construction of contemporary journalistic discourse, both in traditional and new digital media, through the social channel Twitter (X). In doing so, it delves into the evaluation of two central aspects: first, whether new consumption habits developed on social media produce cognitive biases (Greifeneder et al.,2021) that may shape what digital audiences expect to find in publications by news media and, second, to what extent these audiences, accustomed to trusting what they read and share on such platforms (Karlsson et al.,2017;Wagner & Boczkowski,2019), may validate information lacking factual basis and constructed from misleading statements or headlines (Luo et al.,2022). For the purposes of this research, the analysis focuses on the perceptions and expectations that highly qualified digital audiences hold regarding journalism. This term refers to digital-native users (Prensky,2001) familiar with technology, social media, and new devices who are further distinguished from other active audiences (Livingstone,2019) by their high level of education and, consequently, critical thinking, knowledge of new media, and ability to detect misinformation (Orhan,2023). 2. Theoretical Framework 2.1. The Disinformative Context in Digital Environments The transformation in the ways of producing and consuming information in digital environments has blurred traditional boundaries of journalism (Carlson & Lewis,2015). Journalists and media organizations must redefine their role in response to the emergence of new communicative actors engaged in activities that may be perceived as journalism (Maares & Hanusch,2020, p. 262) by audiences, whose perception is decisive as they are the ones who grant legitimacy and credibility (Deuze & Witschge,2016;Kananovich & Perreault,2021). The arrival of these new content creators from journalism’s periphery (Chua & Duffy, 2019), who occupy a significant communicative space by building follower communities and capturing audiences, has led journalists and news media outlets to try to distinguish themselves from these actors to safeguard their “professional jurisdiction” (Lewis,2012), emphasizing traditional values and codes, such as verification, independence, impartiality, and transparency (Singer,2015), in the production of factual stories. Simultaneously, digital environments have fostered spaces for adopting new journalistic routines, moving away from professional normativity and tending toward hybrid solutions (Ferrucci & Canella, 2023) in an increasingly social and participative landscape. In this context of technological impact, the integration of citizen voices in multiplatform content production and audience fragmentation, digital-native mediahave emerged as alternatives to traditional media, proposing new relationships with audiences (Cabrera et al.,2019). These new media of the digital era are characterized by creating community through participatory strategies and thematic specialization, focusing on audience-centered journalism (García-Orosa et al.,2020, p. 12), and utilizing social platforms to do so. With this priority, digital media outlets linked to virality emerged, especially in the 2010s (Denisova,2023), relying on social media traffic volume as their primary distribution strategy (Hurcombe,2022). This also led them to adopt clickbait techniques—that is, content Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 3 of 18 designed to capture user attention by enticing clicks through emotional, sensational, and misleading headlines (Chen et al.,2015). The centrality of social media in the production and circulation of information has resulted in greater polarization of public opinion, an increase in biased messages, and, most notably, an exponential rise in misinformation (Álvaro-Sanchez,2018). Indeed, there has been a surge in so-called fake news, which is distributed globally, massively, and instantly via social media channels and other digital platforms, amplifying the effects of scams (Tandoc & Seet,2024) and creating confusion among news consumers (Elías & Teira,2021). As Elías (2021, p. 21) points out, false or fabricated information coexists with real news but in a biased way through a series of processes “where different channels feed off each other, lending greater credibility to this toxic narrative.” Despite its popularization, the concept of fake news does not encompass all forms of information disorder that exist (Ireton & Posetti,2018;Wardle,2019), nor does it capture the complexity of a disinformation phenomenon that exists for various reasons and can reach different levels of severity (Salaverría et al.,2020). The public dissemination of false content has diversified to such an extent that scams range from simple jokes to decontextualization or deception and may be fabricated deliberately or arise from exaggerations, misinterpretations, or mere confusion. Considering all circumstances, scams spread more quickly and have a greater impact than true news (Vosoughi et al.,2018). This disinformation pandemic, as an “indication of the collapse of the old news order and the chaos of contemporary public communication” (Casero-Ripollés,2020, p. 3), has required the effective implementation of urgent factchecking mechanisms by agencies and journalistic media to detect and combat it (PérezCuriel & Velasco Molpeceres,2020). 2.2. Factuality as a Distinctive Element of Journalism In the so-called “post-truth” era (Suiter,2016), the power of facts has been diminished by the proliferation of falsehoods and conspiracies, “alternative facts,” and moods that carry more weight than evidence itself (McIntyre,2018). This has resulted in greater audience fragmentation (Webster & Ksiazek,2012) and a breakdown of the consensus and common factual basis needed to conceive and interpret reality. Thus, factuality stands as the foundation of “objective journalism” (Schudson,2001) and as the distinguishing element that grants legitimacy to journalistic media over other actors, including politicians and partisan outlets. Grounded in the verification discipline as the essence of journalism (Kovach & Rosenstiel,2014), news discourse has traditionally been constructed factually, meaning it is based on verified facts. The ability of media to provide truthful and reliable news is based on institutionalized professional norms and practices that confer knowledge and authority in the eyes of the public (Karlsson et al.,2017). In this way, factuality as the foundation of new construction is associated with truth and serves as a compelling method of work, involving the effective use of resources—particularly linguistic ones—and the use of evidential markers to earn audience credibility (Ekström & Westlund,2019). In today’s landscape, despite the rise of search engines and social channels as information sources, traditional media that rely on factuality to build their news discourse remain the most credible for a large part of the public (Newman et al.,2021). Moreover, they serve as the best antidote to counter disinformation and align with the demands of audiences who increasingly seek fact-based news rather than content that is debatable and solely opinion-based (Wagner & Boczkowski,2019). Therefore, media authority decreases drastically when they publish news that has not been properly verified (Parks,2022) or when they fail to detect and expose false information (Graves,2017). Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 4 of 18 Although the multiplication of voices and messages through social media does not always make it easy to clearly distinguish truthful news from falsehoods, it is the responsibility of media and journalists to help audiences recognize such misleading content and continue providing them with relevant information (Spradling et al.,2021). 2.3. Audience Expectations and Perceptions There is no doubt that audiences have taken on a central role within the field of journalism, which increasingly directs its strategy toward them (Ferrer-Conill & Tandoc,2018), as do other content creators in hybrid digital environments where, as mentioned earlier, professional and non-professional actors intermingle (Schapals et al.,2019). However, this prioritization of better understanding audiences through metrics is negatively impacting the quality of the information produced: there are more news stories on the same topics, content is published quickly with insufficient verification and context, and imprecise and superficial content proliferates (Furst,2020). This raises the question of the value that digital audiences assign to journalistic quality. Quality has been cited by professionals as a fundamental element in determining and assessing whether the types of content produced and distributed to audiences may ultimately be perceived by them as credible, engaging, and relevant (Sundar,1999). However, its perception and evaluation remain unclear within the collective imagination of such heterogeneous audiences as those in the digital space (Molyneux & Coddington,2020). In fact, generational behavioral differences exist among audiences based on their experience, motivations, and understanding of how news is constructed and where it originates. According to a study by Wunderlich et al. (2022), journalism is perceived differently among younger, digital-native audiences who have not developed defined consumption habits, access more non-journalistic sources, and tend to be more distrustful of the media and adult audiences, also familiar with the analog era, who show greater loyalty to specific media brands and assign higher credibility to the professional sources they follow. These differing perceptions among audience segments regarding the relevance and reliability of certain content over others (Craft et al.,2016) also help explain the difficulty many users have in detecting the degree of truthfulness, factuality, or bias in messages, whether they contain false information or real information. This often leads them to share these messages on social media and digital platforms, either because they do not delve into the full story and focus only on the headline (Herrero & González-Aldea,2022) or because they lend credibility to anything that has many interactions and has thus been previously shared and validated by others (Luo et al.,2022), especially within their own contacts (Gil de Zúñiga & Cheng,2021). Other factors influencing the likelihood of false content spreading and going viral include the topics, especially if they are up-to-date (Hameleers et al.,2021); the presence of news values, such as controversy or the unexpected nature of events; as well as emotional appeal and human interest (Berger & Milkman,2012). In one way or another, we refer to active audiences or “new citizens” (Masip et al., 2019), who act as prosumers and take the initiative to participate in public debate by sharing content in online environments, particularly on social media, without any journalistic filtering. This also allows false information to thrive as there is no media intermediation (Cooke,2018). In light of the above, the relationship between what journalists do and think and how digital audiences consider and value professional work in terms of quality, trust, and credibility warrants further academic exploration (Karlsson et al.,2017, p. 162). Understanding and comprehending the expectations and perceptions of news-consuming audiences will help to better redefine the role of journalistic media within the new attention economy (Truyens & Picone,2021,2024). Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 5 of 18 Accordingly, the primary research objective of this study is to analyze to what extent qualified digital audiences perceive, understand, and value the factuality of news published by news media within a communicative ecosystem where unverified information proliferates on social media channels (RO1). Additionally, this study aims to determine how these audiences value quality journalistic work over other content from external platforms or non-media sites (RO2) and which possible factors influence what audiences expect to find in journalistic media, beyond merely considering the news relevant or of general interest due to its topic (RO3). To address these objectives, the following research questions are raised: • RQ1: To what extent do qualified digital audiences struggle to detect falsehood or bias in journalistic statements? • RQ2: How do qualified digital audiences perceive and value news that is based on more facts and better source work? • RQ3: Which factors are most influential in shaping news perception among qualified digital audiences? 3. Method 3.1. Sample Collection and Content Analysis With these objectives in mind, this research was conducted following two methodological processes. The first comprised a comparative content analysis of a sample of the ten most relevant statements on political or social topics, with the highest number of interactions published on the Twitter (X) accounts of six leading European media outlets, as well as their reflection and development on the respective websites, between 1 January and 31 December 2021. Thus, the content analysis corpus comprises 60 tweets (n= 60) and their corresponding articles published in the digital editions of the media outlets under study. To make the sample, not only tweets but also news articles were considered. Although Twitter provides readers with a mechanism for interpreting the meaning of news (Sadler, 2018) through headlines and links to media websites, it becomes fragmentary and sometimes misleading. Some studies on social media consumption indicate that audiences tend to share news sometimes without reading them or clicking on them (Sundar et al.,2024). For sample selection, the Global Digital Subscription Snapshot, a media ranking by online subscribers published quarterly by the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Périodique (FIPP) in collaboration with CeleraOne—a German company specializing in digital technology and big data—was used as a reference. Specifically, the data used in this study correspond to the third-quarter 2021 report. First, an exploration was conducted to identify the top three European digital-only media outlets with the highest number of subscriptions. According to this criteria, the following media outlets emerged (in order): Médiapart (France), Tortoise (United Kingdom), De Correspondent (Netherlands), El Diario.es (Spain), El Confidencial (Spain), The Local (Sweden), Zetland (Denmark), El Español (Spain), and Krautreporter (Germany). The remaining media on the list are digital subscriptions of outlets with a print edition. Since the Dutch outlet De Correspondent ceased publication in early 2022, the sample was comprised of Médiapart (France), Tortoise (United Kingdom), and El Diario.es (Spain). Once these outlets were identified, the next step was to select generalist media outlets publishing newspapers in these same three countries or markets to compare publication strategies between online editions of traditional media and new digital media. The Twitter (X) accounts and online editions of leading print media outlets in subscriptions in their respective countries that are thus included in the study sample are, in order, The Guardian (United Kingdom), Le Monde (France), and El País (Spain) (See Table 1). Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 6 of 18 Table 1. Contextual data about the media accounts examined. Source: author’s own elaboration. Media Outlet Media Type Country Foundation Account Joined Twitter Médiapart Digital only France 2008 @Mediapart 2009 Tortoise Digital only UK 2018 @tortoise 2018 Eldiario.es Digital only Spain 2012 @eldiarioes 2012 Le Monde Print/Digital France 1944 @lemondefr 2009 The Guardian Print/Digital UK 1821 @guardian 2009 El País Print/Digital Spain 1976 @el_pais 2007 After the sample was collected, the different headlines were evaluated based on journalistic verification criteria, such as the distinction between information and interpretation and opinion, the presence of bias, source usage, background references, language use, and markers of fallacy. To establish these verification criteria, an analysis sheet matrix with 29 items was created to measure and evaluate the information published by the media consistently using the same parameters. The matrix included, in addition to indicators of tweet location and dissemination (retweets, likes, and replies), a series of indicators related to each social statement, as well as each headline and body text of the information published on the websites of the media outlets in the analysis sample. In addition to items related to the topic and geographic scope of each piece of information (national or international), the content indicators for tweets in the analysis sheet detail aspects such as the approach (informative, interpretative, or opinion-based), perspective (partial or declarative from a protagonist or global/with more than one protagonist), and bias. These same indicators (approach, perspective, and bias) are applied to the study of headline content, for which two additional aspects are analyzed: the degree of alignment with the tweet and its relationship to the main content of the news article body. Regarding content indicators for the news texts on each website, not only are the approach, perspective, and bias measured—similar to the tweets and headlines—but also data usage (whether data are verifiable, unverifiable, or inaccurate), whether the information is contextualized, and the number of sources used, as well as the predominant typology in each news text (governmental institutional, non-governmental institutional, journalistic, documentary, expert, anonymous, or without sources). To validate the consistency of this coding instrument, a content analysis was carried out to obtain some preliminary results that would later be debated in the focus groups. Among other findings from the perspective of social audience consumption, a greater viral impact and reliability are detected in tweet-news articles published by generalist media outlets, clickbait techniques promoted by digital natives are disapproved by users in their interactions, and the trend that audiences share information on Twitter without clicking on the links to the news is confirmed. Thus, the first stage of the research served to justify and collect the research sample as well as to validate the coding process employed in the content analysis. As content analysis an important tool for social science in drawing valid inferences about media behaviors (Riffe et al.,2023), in this case on social media platforms and websites, a further methodological qualitative process was needed to respond to the research objectives. Thus, the categories and variables included in the content analysis would be used to conduct the discussion among the participants in the focus groups. 3.2. Focus Groups Based on this structured content analysis, a report of results was obtained, which was further examined in a second phase of the research through two in-person focus groups. Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 7 of 18 The focus group was employed as an ideal methodological tool in social sciences to gather participants’ perceptions (Lunt & Livingstone,1996) and concerns through interaction, thus facilitating a qualitative analysis (Wilkinson,1998). Unlike the so-called “discussion group,” the focus group better meets the needs of this research as it allows for guiding the discussion more effectively using a pre-established questionnaire and obtaining individual responses from participants that are synergistic and comparable (Domínguez & Dávila, 2008, p. 105). This second methodological stage thus addresses one of the stated research objectives: analyzing audience perceptions of published journalistic content and media behavior in light of the content analysis by presenting news examples for participant evaluation. This led to the preparation of these focus groups. The working sessions were held on 24 and 25 November 2022 at the College of Europe in Natolin (Poland). This academic institution offers an Advanced Master’s in European Interdisciplinary Studies, bringing together 125 students each year from across the continent, as well as from other regions, such as North Africa and the Middle East. These students come from various fields of study, are multilingual, and have strong academic records. Since the focus groups aimed, on the one hand, to incorporate participant interdisciplinarity and, on the other, to ensure their qualifications as information consumers with critical thinking skills, the College of Europe proved to be an appropriate setting for this study. Two separate focus groups, each lasting two hours, were conducted. Each session, moderated by the research team and conducted in English, worked with a group of students ranging from six to eight participants, a range that authors like Prieto and March (2002) consider ideal. In total, there were fourteen participants (six men and eight women) from nine different countries (Poland, Portugal, Ukraine, Algeria, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Lebanon, and Ireland), with previous studies in up to eight different disciplines (Law, Business Administration, Journalism, Philology, International Relations, Political Science, History, and Economics). All participants, aged 24 to 30, were part of the “Nest” working group on disinformation within the aforementioned Advanced Master in European Interdisciplinary Studies and were recruited through the professor responsible for that working group, who served as a key informant to identify those with suitable profiles to participate in the sessions. In this way, the focus groups were formed based on elements of homogeneity among participants as they shared common experiences within the same university campus, similar educational levels, and specific training relevant to this study. Meanwhile, diversity was ensured in terms of gender, background, and country of origin to analyze the extent to which these variables might affect their perception and evaluation of the news. The Questionnaire Each session began with a briefing on the research project associated with the focus group, as well as an outline of the procedure to be followed during the session. The second part of the presentation included a questionnaire with ten questions and examples of information published by the media outlets in the analysis sample to establish comparisons among them and measure participants’ perceptions accordingly. As each of the ten examples was displayed on multiple screens in the classroom, participants had access on their computers to an online form containing all the content to respond to the questions individually. Of the fourteen focus group participants, only eight submitted a completed form. The questionnaire was divided into two sections of five open-ended questions each (Table 2) and, at the end of each section, a group discussion was initiated among participants to gather opposing opinions and viewpoints in addition to the responses they had already Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 8 of 18 written on their respective forms. Thus, the focus group would yield two types of results: the collection of completed forms from participants and the recording of sessions with their contributions, which would later be transcribed for analysis. Table 2. Battery of questions posed in the focus groups. Source: author’s own elaboration. Q1 To what degree do you think these tweet statements are true, partly true, or false? Q2 Do you consider these statements information, interpretation, or comment? Q3 Which one is the most based on facts and which one is the least factual? Q4 Which tweet is the most attractive and appealing (in order to obtain engagement)? Why? Q5 Which angle of the story is the most complete according to the number and quality of sources employed in the piece of news? Q6 What parts of the story are more biased by taking into account those absent elements and points of view that would be necessary to complete the story? Q7 To what degree do these headlines properly lead to understanding the stories or are they not directly related to the main element of the reported topic? Q8 Please, compare these pieces according to the kind of sources employed in them. Q9 Please, compare these pieces of news by the topic dealt with and if they are based on newsworthy criteria and can be regarded as general interest/relevant news. Q10 To what degree do you think these tweet statements are true, partly true, or false? The focus group included questions related to ten different statements (shown as screenshots) from the analysis sample. To enable comparisons within each focus group, it was essential to have news items from different media on the same topics, allowing us to transfer elements examined in the content analysis to the focus group. This led us to extract from the sample of 60 news items those that had been published by other media for comparison. The selected news items were COVID-19 (three or four media outlets), the Pandora Papers (general and a specific story about Putin; only in the three consortium research media: Le Monde, The Guardian, and El País), the attendance of former People’s Party leader in Spain, Pablo Casado, at a mass in memory of dictator Francisco Franco (The Guardian, El País, and Eldiario.es), the Citizen’s Security Law or “Gag Law” according to the Council of Europe (El País and Eldiario.es), and the rape accusation of a former British Conservative MP (The Guardian and Tortoise). The French digital outlet Médiapart did not overlap with any other outlet, not even with Le Monde, on national or Francophone topics. This is because they prioritize unique topics and investigations to add value to their coverage for subscribers. As the sample was considered insufficient to complete the entire questionnaire within the focus group, it was expanded through Twitter’s advanced search function to include all news published by the six media outlets in this study that corresponded with the same topics and coverage as the tweet-news items in the initial sample. To increase the sample size, we used search parameters and keywords, such as the names of each media outlet plus topics like COVID or pandemic, Pandora Papers, Putin, Spain, political parties, Gag Law, Council of Europe, Britain/UK, France, and politics. This extended the scope of analysis to a potential 300 tweet-news items (n= 300). This expanded search yielded new examples, enabling the focus group to incorporate additional comparisons between statements and images. In the double focus group, cross-comparisons were made among two or three outlets, either from different countries (COVID-19 or Pandora Papers), to observe the impact Journal. Media 2025,6, 3 9 of 18 of journalistic culture or the potential national perspective on international topics, or between two outlets from the same country (El País-Eldiario.es or The Guardian-Tortoise), to measure the traditional vs. digital-native variable. With this dual objective, two types of information were initially posed in the focus group questionnaire: 1. Headlines and tweets published by different media outlets about the same topic; 2. Tweets and their respective links to news published by different media outlets on the same coverage. Next, a question was included to assess whether the degree of informational bias varies when the same media outlet addresses different topics or protagonists. In this case, The Guardian’s coverage of the appearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Pandora Papers: 3. Headlines and tweets published by the same media outlet about different news and political actors. Finally, also with only one question of this type, a question was asked regarding the newsworthiness criteria used to include chosen topics on the agenda. For this, two of the most retweeted news items in Eldiario.es and Médiapart were selected to compare the dynamics between two digital-native outlets from different countries. In this way, an example from Médiapart was also included in the group discussion, as it was the only one of the six media outlets in the sample that had not appeared for the reasons explained above: 4. Tweets and their links to content that achieved high engagement and were published by different media outlets. In the question set (Table 2), the order followed the variables analyzed in the first part of this study (content analysis). Since the main objective is to assess the extent to which audiences perceive and understand the factuality of news, the same question was asked at the beginning and end of the session regarding participants’ general view of the statement shown and the degree of truthfulness or falsehood they could detect. By asking this question both at the start and the end of the session, the sequence of examples and questions served to check if, and to what extent, participants’ initial perceptions changed or remained after viewing various examples and, most importantly, after discussing them with others. 4. Results The prior content analysis of the six news media outlets in the sample provided the foundation to identify which publications would be presented and discussed with participants in the focus groups. Thus, to address the research questions, a sequence of ten structured questions was presented to the students, both in the presentation and via a form, to gather their impressions on the truthfulness, credibility, and bias of the information shown; the importance of source usage (data) and other quality measures; and the impact of content presentation and its appeal or impact; as well as the relevance of or public interest in the analyzed news items. 4.1. Reflections Shared During the Working Sessions The conversation generated during the focus groups served as a starting point for reflection, later expanded and nuanced by the forms completed by participants. This discussion primarily aimed to analyze which factors may be most decisive for these qualified users to perceive and understand the informational content they consume in one way or another. 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