Political Fact-Checking on Twitter: When Do Corrections Have an Effect?

The effectiveness of short‐format refutational fact‐checks

“…This differs from the real world, of course, where social‐media consumers can more readily ascribe characteristics to information sources, such as trustworthiness and perceived expertise. This means that in the real world, misinformation may have a stronger impact if it comes from a familiar source that is perceived as trustworthy, but also that the effectiveness of fact‐checks may be greater if the fact‐checks come from well‐known, trusted fact‐checkers (e.g., see Guillory & Geraci, ; Margolin et al ., ; Swire, Berinsky et al ., ), which might imply that the general effectiveness of fact‐checking may be under estimated in this research. Exploring the impact of source credibility was beyond the scope of the present work, although we note that source credibility should have no impact on the assessment of differences between our experimental conditions.…”

“…Clearly, fact‐checking can only have broad impact if a large majority view the fact‐checking source as objective and neutral, and the fact‐checks themselves as unbiased, fair, and grounded in reliable evidence (Brandtzaeg & Følstad, ; Guillory & Geraci, ). On social media, fact‐checks are also more likely to be accepted from known sources rather than strangers (Margolin, Hannak, & Weber, ).…”

Reinforcing attitudes in a gatewatching news era: Individual-level antecedents to sharing fact-checks on social media

“…Indeed, for those who consume news via social media, gatewatchers are becoming more influential than the original news sources (Media Insight, 2017). Moreover, fact-checks on social media are more likely to draw attention and responses when they come from friends (Margolin, Hannak, & Weber, 2017).…”

Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing

“…By the same token, we reason that sharing tabloid news is also likely to increase the probability of being challenged by other users. And an important issue in the debate about the problematic quality of online expression is whether the interpersonal networks of social media offer useful opportunities for correcting false or misleading information (Bode and Vraga, 2015;Margolin et al, 2017 We augmented this initial population of tabloid news sharers with a population of Twitter users who followed at least one of the five tabloids but who had not tweeted a link to any tabloid articles. This enabled us to include data for both actual and potential tabloid news sharers.…”