Leveraging Social Norms to Motivate Correction on Social Media

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

Although the overall amount of misinformation circulating on social media is actually relatively low (Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019), 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). Broadly, surveys have found only a minority (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). Yet these public user corrections are effective in limiting misperceptions among the community seeing the correction, across a wide variety of topics (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 conducted a series of 32 qualitative interviews with social media users, to investigate their motivations to engage with misinformation. In these interviews, users told us that the perceived efficacy of corrections to reduce misperceptions and fear of social sanctions and toxic responses deterred correction behaviors, while a sense of duty and concerns about the harm misinformation could cause overcame the reluctance and led people to correct.

Using what we learned as the perceived barriers and incentives to correct, we designed an experimental intervention to attempt to boost willingness to correct misinformation on social media. Specifically, we focused on boosting norms of duty and positive social norms that exist in favor of correction. We designed a 2 x 2 experiment, manipulating the presence or absence of a message that emphasized (1) injunctive norms that people appreciate and like corrections on social media, or (2) descriptive norms that many users do engage in correction on social media.

The experiment will be fielded on a realistic social media platform, designed for research purposes, using a sample of participants from an online panel. We will explore whether these interventions lead people to respond to correct misinformation post or flag the post to the platform when it appears alongside other content on the simulated feed with concrete behavioral data, compared to those that do not receive an intervention.

As such, this study contributes to knowledge in how to motivate users to engage in correction on social media as one effective tool in the fight against misinformation.


References
Bode, Leticia, and Emily K. Vraga. 2018. “See Something, Say Something: Correction of Global Health Misinformation on Social Media.” Health Communication 33(9): 1131–40.
Boulianne, Shelley, Stephanie Belland, Chris Tenove, and Kelsey Friesen. 2021. “Misinformation across Social Media Platforms and across Countries | Research Online at MacEwan.” https://roam.macewan.ca/islandora/object/gm:2822 (January 18, 2022).
Guess, Andrew, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker. 2019. “Less than You Think: Prevalence and Predictors of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook.” Science Advances. http://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586 (January 18, 2022).
Karpf, David. 2019. “On Digital Disinformation and Democratic Myths.” MediaWell, Social Science Research Council. https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/on-digital-disinformation-and-democratic-myths/.
Rapp, David N., and Nikita A. Salovich. 2018. “Can’t We Just Disregard Fake News? The Consequences of Exposure to Inaccurate Information.” Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5(2): 232–39.
Tandoc, Edson C, Darren Lim, and Rich Ling. 2020. “Diffusion of Disinformation: How Social Media Users Respond to Fake News and Why.” Journalism 21(3): 381–98.
Vraga, Emily K., and Leticia Bode. 2018. “I Do Not Believe You: How Providing a Source Corrects Health Misperceptions across Social Media Platforms.” Information, Communication & Society 21(10): 1337–53.
Vraga, Emily K., and Leticia Bode. 2020. “Correction as a Solution for Health Misinformation on Social Media.” American Journal of Public Health 110(S3): S278–80.

Authors

• Leticia Bode, Georgetown University

• Emily Vraga, George Mason University