This study explores how media users determine credibility in the ever-evolving media landscape, centering the attention toward the impact language has on critical media literacy and how people interact and consider Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content. Considering research on bilingualism describing a tendency for bilinguals to differ in their decision-making when using their first (L1) and second (L2) language, a phenomenon known as the foreign language effect (Costa et al., 2013, 2014; Keysar et al., 2012), this study examined 24 university students Spanish (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals’ media literacy from the credibility perspective, with Facebook-like posts generated by ChatGPT in the two languages. Students reflected on the posts’ overall credibility, sharing likelihood, and text’s credibility in a mixed methods approach.
The findings suggest that students perceive English posts to be more credible than Spanish posts, with students considering their ability to analyze credibility better in Spanish. The results imply the existence of a confirmation bias, whereby students tend to consider the content they expect to see as more credible. This potential bias raises a concern as to people’s media literacy at a time when information can be easily generated by AI for malicious purposes (Hutchens, 2024). Supporting prior work exploring the relationship between the foreign language effect and identification of fake news (Caramancion, 2022; Muda et al., 2023), this study shows that bilinguals’ reliance on their L2 experience might disadvantage them in terms of their critical media literacy skills, limiting their ability to critically engage with information online.