Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

Clayton, Katherine; Blair, Spencer; Busam, Jonathan A.; Forstner, Samuel; Glance, John; Green, Guy; Kawata, Anna; Kovvuri, Akhila; Martin, Jonathan W.; Morgan, Evan; Sandhu, Morgan; Sang, Rachel; Scholz-Bright, Rachel A.; Welch, Austin T.; Wolff, Andrew G.; Zhou, Amanda; Nyhan, Brendan

doi:10.1007/s11109-019-09533-0

Cited by 364 publications

(307 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Whereas previous research has shown that substantively correcting false beliefs in the context of news articles may increase misperceptions (Nyhan and Reifler 2010, Nyhan et al 2013, Schaffner and Roche 2016, Berinsky 2017, we find that no such backfire effect occurs when warnings are applied to false political headlines. Our results add to a growing body of evidence (Wood and Porter 2018, Clayton et al 2019, Nyhan et al 2019) that backfire effects are in fact quite elusive and that, instead, people typically respond by updating in the direction of even counterattitudinal information. Not only that, but we actually found that the warning was more effective for false headlines that were consistent with participants' political ideology.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…Indeed, such warnings might actually backfire and increase belief (Nyhan and Reifler 2010, Nyhan et al 2013, Schaffner and Roche 2016, Berinsky 2017. For example, Nyhan and Reifler (2010) found evidence that including a correction of George W. Bush's false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq led to increased belief in the false claim among strong conservatives-although subsequent studies have failed to observe similar effects (Wood and Porter 2018, Clayton et al 2019, Nyhan et al 2019). Thus, the literature does not offer a clear answer as to whether warning tags will effectively reduce belief in false news.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

et al. 2020

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Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org MANAGEMENT SCIENCEAbstract. What can be done to combat political misinformation? One prominent intervention involves attaching warnings to headlines of news stories that have been disputed by third-party fact-checkers. Here we demonstrate a hitherto unappreciated potential consequence of such a warning: an implied truth effect, whereby false headlines that fail to get tagged are considered validated and thus are seen as more accurate. With a formal model, we demonstrate that Bayesian belief updating can lead to such an implied truth effect. In Study 1 (n = 5,271 MTurkers), we find that although warnings do lead to a modest reduction in perceived accuracy of false headlines relative to a control condition (particularly for politically concordant headlines), we also observed the hypothesized implied truth effect: the presence of warnings caused untagged headlines to be seen as more accurate than in the control. In Study 2 (n = 1,568 MTurkers), we find the same effects in the context of decisions about which headlines to consider sharing on social media. We also find that attaching verifications to some true headlines-which removes the ambiguity about whether untagged headlines have not been checked or have been verifiedeliminates, and in fact slightly reverses, the implied truth effect. Together these results contest theories of motivated reasoning while identifying a potential challenge for the policy of using warning tags to fight misinformation-a challenge that is particularly concerning given that it is much easier to produce misinformation than it is to debunk it.

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Section: Concluding Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

et al. 2020

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“…To effectively counter fake news about COVID-19 around the world, governments and social media companies must rigorously develop and test interventions. This includes identifying treatments that effectively reduce belief in misinformation, while not undermining belief in accurate information 140 .…”

Section: Conspiracy Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

et al. 2020

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“…This negative consequence has been called the “implied truth” effect (Pennycook & Rand, ). A more recent study, however, has shown that warning labels are relatively successful in reducing belief in false news and found no evidence of an “implied truth” effect (Clayton et al, ). The study also found that the effects of warning labels did not vary by whether the false news was congruent with respondents’ political attitudes.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This scale is used by the present study to explore the role of message credibility in the relationship between the flagging of false news, in this case through a warning label displayed by Facebook, and false news sharing intention. Research has found an effect of warning labels on the perceived accuracy of false news (Clayton et al, ; Pennycook & Rand, ). Likewise, as mentioned above, research has shown that warning labels reduced people’s willingness to share fake‐news headlines (Pennycook et al, ).…”

Section: Research Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cleaning Up Social Media: The Effect of Warning Labels on Likelihood of Sharing False News on Facebook

Mena¹

2019

Policy & Internet

133

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The flagging of false news has been one of the ways suggested to discourage people from sharing deceiving news stories on social media, and recent years have seen a growing number of initiatives focused on providing credibility labels for news online. Using an experimental design, this study assesses the effectiveness of such labels designed to reduce the sharing of false news. Specifically, it examines the impact of warning labels on Facebook users’ intentions to share false news stories, drawing on a sample of 501 participants from across the political spectrum. The study also explores users’ perceptions of the likelihood that other people would share false news even after seeing a warning label. We find that the flagging of false news may indeed have an effect on reducing false news sharing intentions by diminishing the credibility of misleading information. Furthermore, we find that users may be prone to believing that others are more likely to share false news than themselves, confirming the third‐person effect. This study shows that flagging of false news on social media platforms like Facebook may indeed help the current efforts to combat sharing of deceiving information on social media.

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Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

Cited by 364 publications

References 28 publications

The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

Cleaning Up Social Media: The Effect of Warning Labels on Likelihood of Sharing False News on Facebook

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