## 5 Conclusions  
Via Fakenewslab, volunteers were asked to mark 20 news items as true or false; these news items were previously selected from some online news outlets. We monitored users' activities under five different test environments, each showing articles with distinct information. Users could see the news piece in one of the following forms: a bare headline with a short excerpt of the article; the headline and the full article; the headline with a short excerpt and the original source the article was taken from; how other users rated the article (social scores); a randomly generated rating, presented similar to how other users rated the article (random scores). We also asked 10 experts of media to qualitatively answer 10 ex post questions that would help us validate our findings. The attribution of credibility to news based on the perceived credibility of its source is a well-documented practice in literature [26; 27; 49]. This is especially true for political content produced by partisan news outlets, which are perceived to be more or less credible depending on whether they are ideologically congruent with prior political beliefs [50; 51]. Experts that responded to our Delphi survey (see Appendix A.4) also rated the source of an article as a highly informative feature. However, participants able to see the news source did not classify articles better than those who only saw the headlines; rather, the source misled many users, probably because users stopped focusing on the news itself and were distracted by the (good or bad) reputation of the outlet. In the case of borderline or divisive news, such as in our test, the reputation of the venue may have obfuscated the inherent quality of the news article. Although longer texts could be more informative than shorter ones, our findings suggest that reading an entire article instead of a short preview does not help in distinguishing false from true news. Common sense would suggest that in the full text, the reader could find hints and details to better support their decision; this misconception was also confirmed by the panellists we consulted in our Delphi survey (see Appendix A.4) and by experimental results [52]. However, users that could read the full text performed even worse. A possible explanation for this phenomenon, supported by our analyses, may lie in the fatigue of reading numerous long texts. Volunteers exposed to others' decisions were helped by the \"wisdom of the crowd\", though this could be a slippery slope: in fact, manipulated random feedbacks pushed a negative herding effect, leading to more mis-classifications. Peer influence is acknowledged  
Figure 11: Percentage of users that opened a tab at least once, grouped by age. Lollipop size is proportional to the subgroup population in our dataset. On average, 18.25% of users opened another tab at least once. Teenagers and young adults in the age groups 10–20, 20–30, and 30–40 opened a tab more often than the others. in the literature as capable of impacting individual evaluations of the credibility of news articles [49], especially in the form of bad comments [53; 54]. Interestingly, the panel of experts that responded to our survey was divided about the effectiveness of peer influence on one user's judgement (see Appendix A.4): 30% of them rated other users' influence as non-relevant to their own evaluation. Lastly, young adults were prone to momentarily interrupt the test, coming back at it with more accurate answers, a possible hint of an underlying fact-checking activity. This is due, in our opinion, to higher media literacy and web tool expertise among young generations. Millenniums and Generation Z users could be more encouraged to carry out a \"lateral reading\", i.e., searching the web for relevant information to validate news articles they come across, either by early exposure to the pitfalls of disinformation on internet or by their education [55; 56].