Coping with news doubt: Exploring user-driven tactics to deal with uncertainty about the news

This study examines how news users cope with doubt—moments of uncertainty about the factuality or neutrality of news stories—in an increasingly overwhelming, algorithmically curated hybrid news environment. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews in Belgium, we explore how participants, particularly young people, adopt energy-preserving tactics to manage doubt. These strategies range from dismissing doubt as fleeting to treating it as a constructive, self-protective stance, shaped by topic relevance and by whether doubt was experienced as burdensome or beneficial. Participants expressed doubt toward both editorial and algorithmic news selection and often relied on platforms to eventually surface clarifications, rather than actively verifying information. This approach challenges the notion of a rational, proactive news user and highlights a preference for low-effort coping tactics over verification, such as tolerating uncertainty or waiting for information to find them. The paper argues that media literacy and fact-checking interventions should acknowledge these tactics and embed verified content more broadly to increase incidental exposure and reduce cognitive load.