What effect does exposure to social engagement metrics have on people's propensity to share content?

Does exposure to high numbers for social engagement metrics increase the chances that people will like and share questionable content and/or make it less likely that people will engage in fact checking of low-credibility sources?

Indiana University

References for Exposure to social engagement metrics increases vulnerability to misinformation

Avram, M., Micallef, N., Patil, S., & Menczer, F. (2020). Exposure to social engagement metrics increases vulnerability to misinformation. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-033

Exposure to social engagement metrics increases vulnerability to misinformation

Online information is a critical societal threat in the digital age, and social media platforms are used a major vehicle to spread it. Misinformation can cause serious societal harm, in multiple ways: affecting public health, influencing public policy, instigating violence. spreading conspiracies. reducing trust in authorities, and increase polarization and conflict. The growing societal impact of misinformation has driven research on technical solutions to detect and stop actors that generate and spread such content. There is currently little empirical research on the effects of interface elements of social media feeds on the spread of misinformation. To address this gap, they empirically investigated how the spread of low-credibility content is affected by expo-sure to typical social engagement metrics, i.e., the numbers of Likes and Shares shown for a news article.

Implications of the study

The Research Questions

They investigated the effect of social engagement metrics on the spread of information from low-credibility sources using Fakey, a new literacy game that stimulates a social media feed. The game presents players with actual current news articles from mainstream and low-credibility media sources. A randomly generated social engagement metric is displayed with each presented article. Then the players are instructed to share, like, fact check, or skip articles. Over 19-months after deploying the game, they analyzed game-play sessions of over 8,500 unique players, mainly from the United States, involving approximately 120,000 articles, half from sources flagged as low-credibility by news and fact-checking organizations. 

The Experimental Design

Their findings suggest that the display of social engagement metrics can strongly influence interaction with low-credibility information. The higher the engagement, the more prone people are to sharing questionable content and less to fact checking it. These findings imply that social media platforms must rethink how engagement metrics should be displayed such that they do not facilitate the spread of misinformation or hinder the spread of legitimate information. Further research is needed to guard against malicious tampering with engagement metrics at an early stage and to design education interventions that teach users to prioritize trustworthiness of news courses over engagement metrics.

Learn Before

Related