Exploring Lightweight Interventions at Posting Time to Reduce the Sharing of Misinformation on Social Media

Abstract

When users on social media share content without considering its veracity, they may unwittingly be spreading misinformation. In this work, we investigate the design of lightweight interventions that nudge users to assess the accuracy of information as they share it. Such assessment may deter users from posting misinformation in the first place, and their assessments may also provide useful guidance to friends aiming to assess those posts themselves. In support of lightweight assessment, we first develop a taxonomy of the reasons why people believe a news claim is or is not true; this taxonomy yields a checklist that can be used at posting time. We conduct evaluations to demonstrate that the checklist is an accurate and comprehensive encapsulation of people's free-response rationales. In a second experiment, we study the effects of three behavioral nudges---1) checkboxes indicating whether headings are accurate, 2) tagging reasons (from our taxonomy) that a post is accurate via a checklist and 3) providing free-text rationales for why a headline is or is not accurate---on people's intention of sharing the headline on social media. From an experiment with 1668 participants, we find that both providing accuracy assessment and rationale reduce the sharing of false content. They also reduce the sharing of true content, but to a lesser degree that yields an overall decrease in the fraction of shared content that is false. Our findings have implications for designing social media and news sharing platforms that draw from richer signals of content credibility contributed by users. In addition, our validated taxonomy can be used by platforms and researchers as a way to gather rationales in an easier fashion than free-response.

Lateral reading and monetary incentives to spot disinformation about science

“…This account posits that certain features of social networks favour the dissemination of interesting and unexpected content at the expense of accuracy 6 , 60 . Recent research in this field has found both laboratory and field evidence that accuracy of content is often overlooked and that simple cues reminding participants to evaluate the accuracy of content reduce participants’ willingness to share fake news 35 , 37 , 61 – 63 (or possibly increase true news sharing 38 ). Increasing accuracy through incentives is not an entirely novel idea in social media either, as shown in a recent initiative promoted by Twitter 64 .…”

The Information Ecosystem of Conspiracy Theory: Examining the QAnon Narrative on Facebook

“…A body of research on intervention strategies to reduce the psychological effects of misinformation is also growing [16,20,27,37,38,46]. Guess et al [20] tested a digital media literacy intervention in the U.S. and India.…”

“…They found that interaction with the conspiracy theory content related to global warming decreased individuals' confidence in the scientific consensus and reduced proenvironmental decision making. Loomba et al [34] conducted a randomized controlled trial and found that the exposure to misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines decreased individuals' intent to get vaccinated.A body of research on intervention strategies to reduce the psychological effects of misinformation is also growing [16,20,27,37,38,46]. Guess et al [20] tested a digital media literacy intervention in the U.S. and India.…”

Making Online Communities 'Better': A Taxonomy of Community Values on Reddit

“…This 'implicit values' perspective can be used to identify what values of online communities are most studied by the research community, and conversely, what values are most understudied ( §5.1). There is a great deal of work implicitly valuing the trustworthiness and factualness of information shared within communities (i.e., the absence of mis/disinformation) [3,8,30,36,37,44,54,65,74,87,96]. Similarly, the absence of abusive, harassing, or spammy content is widely studied [9,11,13,31,60,61,66,91], as is compliance with community rules and norms [12,58,60].…”