Fact-checking as Persuasion? Countering Misinformation with Corrective Messages

• In Event: Who Checks the Fact Checkers, and to What Effect?

Abstract

On its surface, the goal of journalistic fact-checking is to provide the public accurate information about politics by evaluating the veracity of political claims and calling out misinformation, spin, lies, and deception. These goals are reflected in the mission statements of leading fact-checking organizations, who note that their purpose is to “reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics” (Fact-check.org, 2015) and to help citizens “find truth in politics” (politifact.com, 2017). Inherent in this mission, though perhaps not explicitly stated, are the intentions to change existing public misperceptions about the political world into more accurate beliefs, or to prevent false beliefs from forming in the first place. Yet in most instances correcting political misperceptions via fact-checking is not simply a matter of providing people relevant, accurate information or filling a knowledge deficit; people often know the facts and evidence surrounding contested claims but instead choose not to believe those facts. This problem raises the intriguing suggestion that in order for fact-checking messages to be effective in facilitating accurate beliefs, they must ultimately be persuasive. Fact-checks must convince the audience to reject false claims and believe the facts, an already difficult task that is compounded by individuals’ propensity to accept misinformation that is consistent with their worldview and reject corrective messages that challenge it.
While the notion that fact-checking messages need to persuade the audience may in many ways be antithetical to journalists’ adherence to objectivity and neutrality, conceptualizing fact-checking as a form of persuasion may allow us to better understand the processes through which fact checks succeed or fail, and also provides practitioners a stronger theoretical foundation for testing the effectiveness of their messages. In particular, it allows us to draw on a wealth of persuasion literature that highlights how messages can form or change beliefs, as fact-checking aims to accomplish.
Work on persuasive messaging suggests two key potential mechanisms through which fact-checking messages may be effective in countering false information. First, an important precursor to actual message effectiveness is the audience’s perceptions of effectiveness. If the audience perceives the arguments in a message to be strong and convincing, the likelihood that they accept that message substantially increases. In the case of misinformation, if the audience perceives the original false claims to be strong and of high quality, they are more likely to become misinformed. If, however, corrective fact-checking messages can reduce the degree to which people perceive the original false information as valid and convincing, it is likely that the correction will be more effective. Thus, assessments of argument strength offer a viable but unexplored route through which fact-checking messages might lead to more accurate beliefs.
Second, individuals are considerably more willing to believe inaccurate information if the source of the false claims is deemed credible. This makes correcting false political information all the more difficult because the original source of the misinformation is often a trusted source that holds a similar worldview, such as a co-partisan or a like-minded media outlet. However, there is a possibility that fact-checking messages alter assessments of source credibility and subsequent evaluations of false claims—even those sources people are inclined to trust and believe—by highlighting how and why the original source of inaccurate information was wrong. It is therefore necessary to examine whether political fact-checking messages can be effective by encouraging skepticism about the source of misinformation, even if that source is a like-minded partisan.
This study uses two independent experiments with demographically diverse samples of adults in the United States to examine whether corrections are effective by diminishing the audience’s perceptions of the strength of the arguments surrounding the false claims and the credibility of the original source of the misinformation. Study 1 examines these processes in the context of a false claim whereby the partisan association of the source of the misinformation is ambiguous, while Study 2 directly manipulates the political party of the source of the false claims to examine whether corrections can overcome politically biased information processing that threatens the success of fact-checking messages. Doing so allows us to examine perceptions of message quality and source credibility in both a non-partisan and partisan context. Results indicate corrections change the perceived quality of the misinformation and at times discredit the source of false claims, which subsequently improve belief accuracy. The findings suggest that corrections can be effective in forming accurate beliefs, even in partisan contexts.

Author

• Brian E. Weeks, University of Michigan