In an era of misinformation facilitated in large volumes through social media, infographics act as a bite-sized visual medium created for the express purpose of spreading complex information in an easy-to-digest format. The popularity of visual content on social media is increasing every day, and as a first step to curb the spread of visual misinformation online, it is vital to understand how people determine its credibility. This is because credibility often acts as a precursor to behaviors and most existing literature focusing on credibility either delves into text-based content or the design of platforms.An acknowledged gap in credibility research is message credibility. Credibility research has, instead, often focused on the ever-popular source credibility, with volumes of it exploring both, offline and online source credibility. Where misinformation can reach people through many different ways, the internet has exacerbated its effects, in that the source of a message may not, in fact, be a viable option for people to use in order to determine credibility. A large volume of content on the internet is visual (as opposed to text-based), and this dissertation delves into how past credibility research can be applied to more visual messages.Considering an infographic to be a single message, determinants of message credibility were mapped onto a visual platform (infographics). Through two studies-one focusing on the structure of the message and the other on exaggeration of its message-the credibility of three health infographics were determined.The results indicated that the structure of the health infographic did indeed play a role in its message credibility determination. The importance of this structure is discussed through the lens of its importance in creating a narrative for the health infographic. Message exaggeration was also found to have an effect on message credibility, thus indicating the possible effect of having unbiased or opinionated visual messages. The moderating effect of prior assumptions about manipulated content were also found. Findings and implications are discussed.
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