Do people believe in misleading information disseminated via contemporary Internet memes? Do they believe in it more compared with information provided via text? This research explores these questions via a 3 (modality: contemporary internet meme vs text-only vs text-with-explanation) × 2 (identity-congruence: congruent vs incongruent) between-subject online experiment, using two contexts of investigation (crime and taxes). Findings indicate that identity-congruent posts (vs incongruent), regardless of modality, were perceived as more credible. These effects occurred due to the invocation of the self-identity heuristic (if content is similar to my identity, then it is automatically credible) and the other-identity heuristic (if content is similar to the identity of others in my network, then it is automatically credible). However, the effects of identity-congruent posts were diminished when the content was presented as a contemporary Internet meme (vs text). This occurred because identity-congruent posts in meme modality evoke anger.
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