pckeron.blogg.se

For example, Instagram is now asking users “Are you sure you want to post this?” before they are able to post bullying comments (Lee, 2019). We suggest that social media companies should implement these pauses and encourage people to consider the accuracy and quality of what they are posting. This is good news for social media companies who may be able to improve the quality of information on their site by asking people to pause and think before sharing information, especially since the intervention did not reduce sharing of true information (the effects were limited to false headlines). In a large online survey experiment, we found that asking participants to explain how they knew that a political headline was true or false decreased their intention to share false headlines. Instead, we sought a solution that would reduce shares of incorrect information while not affecting accurate information. Social media exists to allow people to share information with others, so our goal was not to reduce shares in general. Thus, one way to reduce the spread of misinformation is to reduce the likelihood that individuals will share false information that they find online. While propagandists, profiteers, and trolls are responsible for the creation and initial sharing of much of the misinformation found on social media, this false information spreads due to actions of the general public (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018). This research suggests that forcing people to pause and think can reduce shares of false information.The intervention was less effective for headlines that had been seen previously in the experiment.

Before rating how likely they would be to share the story, some participants were asked to “Please explain how you know that the headline is true or false.”.In this experiment, 501 participants from Amazon’s mTurk platform were asked to rate how likely they would be to share true and false news headlines.Can asking people to explain why a headline is true or false decrease sharing of false political news headlines? Is this intervention effective for both novel headlines and ones that were seen previously?.