Misinformation is rampant in today's online age, but can it be combatted by social media user corrections or linking to a news organization's fact check?

A new article in Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review co-authored by SIS Professor Sumitra Badrinathan explores how user corrections influence the perceived accuracy of social media posts containing false COVID-19 information, how they influence participants’ willingness to share them, and whether such corrections are more effective when they contain links to fact checks.

Badrinathan and her co-authors conducted a pre-registered online experiment on representative samples of the online population in Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom and found that in India and Brazil, short user corrections slightly, but often not significantly, reduced belief in misinformation and participants’ willingness to share it. In the United Kingdom, these effects were even smaller and not significant, potentially because belief in COVID-19 misinformation was so low that corrections had almost no scope to be effective: Before being exposed to corrections, participants did not believe the COVID-19 misinformation and were not willing to share it online.

The authors also found little evidence that fact-check links made user corrections more effective, suggesting that user corrections are no panacea and that efforts to fight misinformation cannot rest entirely on the shoulders of social media users. Effective interventions against misinformation require a combination of strategies as well as reaching and targeting vulnerable populations, and while social media users and ordinary citizens can meaningfully contribute, institutional and platform-level interventions are likely to be much more impactful.

Read the full article here.