Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 8, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 8, 2023 - Mar 5, 2023
Date Accepted: May 29, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Social reference cues can reduce misinformation sharing on social media: An experimental study on Twitter
ABSTRACT
Background:
Misinformation on social media is a key challenge to effective and timely public health responses. Existing mitigation measures include flagging misinformation or providing links to correct information but have not yet targeted social processes.
Objective:
We examine whether providing balanced social reference cues in addition to flagging misinformation leads to reductions in sharing behavior and improvement of overall sharing quality.
Methods:
Three field experiments within Twitter users´ native social media feed (via a newly developed browser extension). Participants feed was augmented to include misleading as well as control information, and we tracked which content participants shared or liked.
Results:
A total of 1424 (N=824, N=322, and N=278) Twitter users participated. We find that social cues that reference users´ personal network combined with a misinformation flag reduce the sharing of misleading but not control information and improve overall sharing quality. (Study 1-3). We show that this improvement could be driven by change in injunctive social norms (Study 2) but not social identity (Study 3).
Conclusions:
Social reference cues, combined with misinformation flags can significantly and meaningfully reduce the amount of misinformation shared and improve overall sharing quality. They are feasible and scalable means to effectively curb the sharing misinformation on social media.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.