Why Bother? A Qualitative Study of Why People Correct Others on Social Media

• In Event: Is There a Cure for Misinformation?

Abstract

Although the overall amount of misinformation circulating on social media is actually relatively low (Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019), most social media users believe they are exposed to misinformation on a regular basis. Exposure to misinformation can make people less sure of the truth (Rapp and Salovich 2018), and may undermine democratic responsiveness and other democratic norms (Karpf 2019).

Current research suggests that, when users do see misinformation, most people chose to ignore it, which could allow it to spread unchecked (Tandoc, Lim, and Ling 2020). Others, however, decide to engage by either sharing, reporting, or correcting misinformation. Exploratory survey research has revealed that one in five social media users say they have shared news even when they knew it was made up (Wasserman and Madrid-Morales 2019). Another 23-31% of users engage in correction (Boulianne et al. 2021), which we define as responding to misinformation shared on social media with correct information (Vraga and Bode 2018), while between 17% and 24% (depending on the country) report the misinformation to the platform (Boulianne et al. 2021).

Previous research has found that public user corrections are effective in limiting misperceptions among the community seeing the correction, across a wide variety of topics (Bode and Vraga 2018). These studies have identified several practices that make corrections more effective, such as providing a link to an expert source, repeating corrections, and providing alternative explanations (Vraga and Bode 2020). Given the efficacy of user corrections in reducing the negative impacts of misinformation on social media, mobilizing more users to engage in these efforts offers a promising avenue for mitigation efforts.

To do this, we need to better understand who is engaging in public corrections of others on social media, the barriers to correction that people who do not currently correct others perceive, and how to motivate more people to provide accurate and effective corrections.

To answer these questions, we conduct a series of qualitative interviews to investigate social media users’ motivations to engage with misinformation.

We recruit four specific groups of people based on their experiences with correction of misinformation on social media: 1) those that say they correct others, 2) those that say they do not correct others, 3) those that say they have been corrected, and 4) those that say they have witnessed others being corrected. Each group consists of approximately 15 participants, for a total of 60 interviews. Participants are recruited based on their eligibility in one or more of the four categories, with additional attention given to maintaining a diverse sample of participants, particularly with regard to age, gender, race, education, and partisanship.

Participants are interviewed for approximately one hour each, using a semi-structured approach, asking about when, why, and how they have corrected others or reported misinformation to the platform, seen others do so, have refrained from doing so, or have been corrected. They will then be shown several misinformation posts, and asked about how they would decide whether or not to engage with the posts, and how they would engage with them if they did.

Analyzing the data from the interviews will allow us to answer our key questions about why people choose to correct (or refrain from correcting), and how we might encourage more people to do so. This has implications for the information ecosystem and the nature of interpersonal persuasion that takes place online.

Authors

• Leticia Bode, Georgetown University

• Emily K. Vraga, George Mason University