The Effects of Sustained Exposure to Fact-checking Information: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Twitter
Speaker: (opens in a new window)Felicia Löcherbach (University of Amsterdam)
Wednesday, February 7, 14:00–14:45 (Irish time)
Please register (opens in a new window)here to receive the link and password to the online meeting and information on the room at UCD.
Abstract: Social media companies and civic society rely heavily on fact-checking to counter misinformation online in real time. While numerous studies have shown the efficacy of single-shot corrective interventions, the effects of sustained exposure to fact-checking information in a realistic social media environment have yet to be tested. In this study, we conduct a one-month field intervention implemented in a widely used social media platform to analyze the causal effect of substantially increasing users’ exposure to fact-checking accounts and content on misinformation resilience and downstream attitudinal outcomes. In our design, Twitter users will be randomly assigned to an intervention group that will have a new timeline in their accounts composed of a pre-curated list of fact-checking organizations added to the top of their Twitter feeds, and a control group where nothing is added. Over a four-week period, participants’ compliance with the intervention will be consistently assessed, and two survey waves will measure outcomes of interest. We hypothesize that increased fact-checking exposure will enhance misinformation resilience and mitigate polarization. However, it is expected that perceptions of politics and media will be influenced negatively, resulting in increased cynicism and decreased trust. Our study provides novel causally identified effects for the practical and sustained impact of fact-checking on misinformation resilience and attitudinal downstream effects that go beyond previous efforts using simulated environments and single-shot experiences. More importantly, ahead of past elections in Brazil and United States, Twitter deployed similar strategies to increase the uptake of credible information on the platform. We are the first to provide causal evidence about the effects of these types of interventions.
About the speaker: (opens in a new window)Felicia Löcherbach is an assistant professor in political communication and journalism at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. She obtained her PhD in Computational Political Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) at the NYU.
Her research interests include (the diversity of) online news consumption and using computational methods in the social sciences. She studies the impact that changes in online environments have on the understanding and usage of news. Specifically, she uses computational approaches to study when and where users come across different types of news – collecting digital trace data via innovative approaches such as data donations, analyzing different dimensions of diversity of the content, and how it affects the perceptions and attitudes of users.