Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation has been circulating on social media and multiple conspiracy theories have since become quite popular. We conducted a U.S. national survey for three main purposes. First, we aim to examine the association between social media news consumption and conspiracy beliefs specific to COVID-19 and general conspiracy beliefs. Second, we investigate the influence of an important moderator, social media news trust, that has been overlooked in prior studies. Third, we further propose a moderated moderation model by including misinformation identification. Our findings show that social media news use was associated with higher conspiracy beliefs, and trust in social media news was found to be a significant moderator of the relationship between social media news use and conspiracy beliefs. Moreover, our findings show that misinformation identification moderated the relationship between social media news use and trust. Implications are discussed.

自 COVID-19 大流行开始以来，错误信息一直在社交媒体上传播，多种阴谋论从此变得非常流行。我们针对三个主要目的进行了一项美国全国调查。首先，我们旨在研究社交媒体新闻消费与 COVID-19 特有的阴谋信念和一般阴谋信念之间的关联。其次，我们调查了在之前的研究中被忽视的重要调节器社交媒体新闻信任的影响。第三，我们通过包含错误信息识别进一步提出了一个适度的调节模型。我们的研究结果表明，社交媒体新闻的使用与更高的阴谋信念相关，并且发现对社交媒体新闻的信任是社交媒体新闻使用与阴谋信念之间关系的重要调节因素。而且，我们的研究结果表明，错误信息识别调节了社交媒体新闻使用与信任之间的关系。影响进行了讨论。