I believe that it may help to mitigate the spread of misinformation if there is a mandate to have an accuracy prompt at the beginning of any and all informative literature. It could be a sticker or a heading that says some kind of slogan meant to encourage the reader to stay focused on how accurate the information appears to be. Think of how disclaimers are handled in media as an example of what this may look like.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A study in which participants were primed to think about accuracy while choosing whether to share a headline on Facebook showed a significant increase in positive sharing discernment over participants who were not primed. Primed participants were less likely than unprimed participants to share false headlines, and equally likely to share true headlines. A follow-up experiment shared two untrustworthy sources—one accompanied by an accuracy prompt—and found 2.8 times higher levels of positive sharing discernment towards the source accompanied by the accuracy prompt. Results suggest that misinformation sharing is often caused by distraction from the concept of accuracy, especially on social media.

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