Zhao, W. (2019). Misinformation correction across social media platforms. 2019 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI). https://doi.org/10.1109/csci49370.2019.00256 

Syracuse University

A study called “Misinformation Correction across Social Media Platforms” conducted by Wenqing Zhao explores the effectiveness of corrective messaging across multiple social media platforms versus when corrective messaging is only shown on a single social media platform. This study finds that corrective messaging repeated across multiple social media platforms is more effective than corrective messaging alone on a single social media platform. This strategy of using multimedia corrective messaging can be used as a more effective solution for combating misinformation within social media.

Corrective Messaging across Social Media Platforms

Misinformation Correction across Social Media Platforms

When a message is delivered across multiple platforms it can lead to higher persuasiveness of that message. The same message can have a higher persuasiveness if it has multiple sources rather than a single source regardless of the message’s actual quality. People often perceive different social media sources as different independent information sources.

Multiple Source Effect

This study looks to prove the meta hypothesis that corrective messages delivered across social media platforms can lead to greater persuasive outcomes than same messages delivered by a single social media platform. The study used 251 undergraduate students for the participant group. The participants took a pretest measuring their attitudes towards vaccinations, then participants were put into either the single-platform or cross-platform condition. The single-platform group read 3 corrective messages shown on either Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The cross-platform group read 3 corrective messages shown on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Then participants had to take a post-test measuring their attitudes towards the messages and vaccinations. Variables such as popularity perception, perceived message credibility, perceived message quality, perceived value, perceived descriptive norm, perceived injunctive norm, vaccination certainty judgements, and manipulation check were measured.

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