The effectiveness of short‐format refutational fact‐checks

Abstract

Fact-checking has become an important feature of the modern media landscape. However, it is unclear what the most effective format of fact-checks is. Some have argued that simple retractions that repeat a false claim and tag it as false may backfire because they boost the claim's familiarity. More detailed refutations may provide a more promising approach, but may not be feasible under the severe space constraints associated with social-media communication.In two experiments, we tested whether (1) simple 'false-tag' retractions can indeed be ineffective or harmful; and (2) short-format (140-character) refutations are more effective than simple retractions. Regarding (1), simple retractions reduced belief in false claims, and we found no evidence for a familiarity-driven backfire effect. Regarding (2), short-format refutations were found to be more effective than simple retractions after a 1-week delay but not a one-day delay. At both delays, however, they were associated with reduced misinformation-congruent reasoning.

How Stories in Memory Perpetuate the Continued Influence of False Information

“…Simply providing people with the correct “facts” does not mean that people will update their mental model to reflect them. In these cases, it may be necessary to provide a detailed refutation that includes a causal component; for example, if a drug complication is not, in fact, caused by an interaction with a certain type of food, it may be necessary to not only explain that the assumption is false and why, but also provide some explanation for why the assumption was initially held in the first place (see Ecker et al., ; Paynter et al., ). Regulatory agencies may enact policies surrounding retraction efforts that leverage this insight: companies issuing a retraction may be required to explicitly articulate an alternative causal explanation (if available) as well as the reasons behind the initial, false assumption, rather than a mere negation of prior information.…”

“…Thus, if a correction targets a familiar myth, people may accept the myth as true despite the correction, based on its familiarity (Swire, Ecker, & Lewandowsky, ). Some scholars have even proposed that the mere retraction of information can enhance the familiarity of the false information because it is repeated in the retraction (Schwarz, Sanna, Skurnik, & Yoon, ; but see Ecker, Hogan, & Lewandowsky, ; Ecker, O'Reilly, Reid, & Chang, ).…”

Can corrections spread misinformation to new audiences? Testing for the elusive familiarity backfire effect

“…Thus, the main purpose of the present study was to investigate the possibility of a familiarity backfire effect within the context of correcting novel misinformation. To this end, the study aimed to replicate Ecker et al (2020), using claims that were maximally novel to participants.…”

Mask Mandates, Misinformation, and Data Voids in Local News Coverage of COVID-19

“…Additionally, the emotional content (like anger) of misinformation can trigger motivated reasoning (Weeks, 2015 Early research suggested that when someone is corrected, people will dig in their heels and the correction will backfire, causing someone to believe in the misinformation even more (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010). However, subsequent research has not been able to recreate the backfire effect (Weeks and Garrett, 2014;Amazeen, et al, 2018;Ecker, et al, 2020;Pennycook, et al, 2020;Swire-Thompson, et al, forthcoming), suggesting that the backfire effect is rare and isolated to specific circumstances (Wood and Porter, 2019) that may be driven more by partisanship, ideology, or specific groups (Nyhan, et al, 2013) in response to specific pieces of misinformation (Nyhan, 2020). The broad debunking of the backfire effect shows that correcting misinformation is possible and local news can help people come to the truth by giving consumers accurate information.…”