Geeng, C., Francisco, T., West, J., & Roesner, F. (2020). Social Media COVID-19 Misinformation Interventions Viewed Positively, But Have Limited Impact. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.11055. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.11055

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Researchers used an exploratory mixed-methods survey to study social media users’ perceptions and sentiments toward warning labels on COVID-19 misinformation and how they were able to determine if those posts actually contain misinformation. Most of the participants in the survey had positive attitudes towards social media interventions in addressing misinformation, and they used other web sources to identify correct information. Research questions are as follows:
- What are people’s attitudes towards social media platform interventions for COVID-19 misinformation, including generic banners linking to authoritative sources and specific false information labels? 
- How did people discover that COVID-19 misinformation was actually false? Specifically, what was the role of social media platform interventions in this discovery, compared to other methods?  

Social Media COVID-19 Misinformation Interventions Viewed Positively, But Have Limited Impact

- Administered an online survey anonymously from March 20th to 26th, 2020 to obtain quantitative and qualitative responses to participates recruited through Prolific and volunteers from the researchers’ network through social media at least 18 years of age.
- Total of 202 participants from Prolific, 111 from personal networks, and 2 excluded due to their insincere responses  
- Used Wilcoxon signed rank test to compare results
- Survey questions: optional demographic questions about age, location, and political affiliation and questions asking if participants have encountered misinformation interventions on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. For participants who have, they are given a free response question to describe and explain their experience and rate the effectiveness of the intervention on a scale of “Not at all helpful (1)” to “Extremely helpful (5).” Also asked participants how they were able to tell those labels were actually labeling misinformation and where they ultimately found true information

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