Pennycook, G., Epstein, Z., Mosleh, M., Arechar, A., Eckles, D., & Rand, D. (2020). Understanding and reducing the spread of misinformation online. ACR North American Advances.

University of California, Berkeley

This study looks at how willing social media users are to share misinformation or unbelievable content, finding that users are often able to distinguish what is true and untrue, but often fail to first consider this before sharing. Because of this, they find nudging to be a good strategy for pushing users to consider whether information is true or false before sharing. 

Understanding and Reducing the Spread of
Misinformation Online

Understanding and Reducing the Spread of Misinformation Online

- subject pool of 5379 Twitter users who had retweeted from Breitbart or Infowars before
- bot accounts were used to send direct messages to users asking to rate the accuracy of a non-political headline
- users were randomly assigned to a date in which they would be sent the direct message
- within each 24-hour window, the links shared by the messaged users were compared to those that weren't messaged

Understanding and Reducing the Spread of Misinformation Online Methods

- intervention led to a 1.9% increase (p=.009) in the average quality of new sites shared
- the way social media is set up gives little chances for users to even consider if something is true or false
- something that might help is to periodically have users rate the accuracy of an article/headline

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