Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents

On the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompts Across Partisan Lines: An Adversarial Collaboration

“…A series of lab and field experiments have reported that shifting attention to accuracy (e.g., by asking about the accuracy of an unrelated news headline) improved the quality of people's news-sharing decisions (Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2021;Pennycook, McPhetres, et al, 2020). Similar findings have been replicated in numerous studies (Arechar et al, 2023;Bhardwaj et al, 2023;Calianos et al, 2022;Capraro & Celadin, 2023;Ceylan et al, 2023;Epstein et al, 2023;Offer-Westort et al, 2022;Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2022;Rasmussen et al, 2022), although some others have found mixed or nonsignificant results (Gavin et al, 2022;Pretus et al, 2022;Roozenbeek et al, 2021).…”

“…We offer a possible explanation for this moderation effect. The impact of single-item evaluation and importance treatments is known to be moderated by perceived headline accuracy (Arechar et al, 2023; Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2021): The impact of the nudge on someone’s willingness to share a (false) headline becomes smaller the more accurate they believe the misinformation to be and can therefore be expected to work less well (or not at all) both for more persuasive/plausible misinformation and among groups who are more prone to believing misinformation. Because several studies have suggested that U.S. conservatives tend to rate misinformation as more accurate than liberals (e.g., Garrett & Bond, 2021; Pennycook & Rand, 2019), this may reduce the treatment impact.…”

“…Second, the studies assessed here all primarily recruited U.S.-based participants. Future research may examine how accuracy prompts may vary in their effectiveness across the political spectrum in non-U.S. contexts (Arechar et al, 2023). Third, the news stimuli used across all studies were sampled via the procedure outlined in Pennycook, Binnendyk, et al (2021), in which false stories were selected from those fact-checked by professional fact-checking organizations and true stories were selected from mainstream news outlets.…”

Scaling crowdsourcing interventions to combat partisan misinformation

“…Crowdsourced knowledge by non-experts can also help people discern the veracity of political statements (Espina Mairal et al, 2023), which could have wide-ranging effects on how we moderate content on social media. This is partly because, when aggregated, laypeople's judgments can be used to accurately discern reliable news sources (Pennycook & Rand, 2019) and true news headlines (Arechar et al, 2023).…”

Behavioural interventions to reduce vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation on social media

“…Even before March 2020, vaccine hesitancy was directly linked to misinformation (false, inaccurate information promoted as factual) spread on social media 18. Once covid-19 reached pandemic status, social media was acknowledged as the epicentre of misinformation leading to hesitancy,1920 and consequently, interventions to tackle hesitancy have globally focused on delivery through social media 2122…”