Abstract

I will give an overview of our work assessing various interventions against misinformation and "fake news" on social media. I will start by briefly discussing the limitations of two of the most commonly discussed approaches: warnings based on professional fact-checking, which are not scalable and we find can increase belief in, and sharing, of misinformation which is not flagged ; and emphasizing publishers, which is (surprisingly) ineffective because untrusted outlets typically produce headlines that are judged as inaccurate even without knowing the source . I will then focus on two more promising approaches: nudging social media users to think about accuracy, which we show increases the quality of political news shared in a field experiment with over 5000 Twitter users who previously tweeted Breitbart links as well as COVID-19 (mis)information, and using crowdsourcing to identify misinformation, as we show that crowds of laypeople produce judgments that are highly aligned with professional fact-checkers when assessing news sources and individual articles.

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Reference

David Rand (Boston University and MIT), “Understanding and reducing the spread of misinformation "online"”, IAST General Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, March 12, 2021, 16:00–17:00, room Zoom.