Fighting Misinformation on Social Media

[Music]

as you might have heard

or even experience yourself there is a

lot of worry these days

about misinformation that is being

shared on social media

these outlandish posts about 5g and

coronavirus

and hillary clinton endorsing donald

trump for example

were shared over a thousand times the

success of this kind of content

is both surprising and concerning

and has led into new fields of research

exploring how much misinformation is out

there

and what leads people to believe and

share it

but mostly attention has been paid to

the more important question

what can actually be done about this

problem

this is what i’ve been focusing on and

today

i’m going to tell you about one such

possible solution

in my search for solutions i started

asking the basic question

how why people share misinformation in

the first place

let’s look at these two headlines again

you don’t have to be a genius to tell

they are probably false

and yet each one was shared by thousands

of people

what were these people thinking or

actually

were they really even thinking at all it

is not actually obvious

what the impact of more thinking would

be on misinformation sharing

it could be that if people think more

they will be better able to identify

false claims

and therefore more discerning in what

they share

could also be that more thinking leads

to more motivated reasoning

leading people to seek out believe and

share

content that aligns with their ideology

even if it’s not true

teasing these two possibilities apart is

really important

as they offer opposite suggestions about

whether it will help

or hurt to get people to think more

so i set out to test whether analytical

thinking

helps people uncover truth or amplifies

bias

in my work i use the lens of cognitive

science

and consider people’s decision-making as

arising from two different modes of

information processing

they may stop and think carefully or

just go with their gut responses

and intuitions to measure the extent to

which

people rely on their analytical thinking

versus intuitive gut responses

i use the cognitive reflection test

which consists

of a set of questions with compelling

intuitive but drawing

answers for example if you’re running a

race

and pass the person in second place what

place are you in

the answer that intuitively comes to

mind for many people

is first place but think about it for a

second

this is not the correct answer if you

pass the person in second place

you are in second place the idea here is

to capture the extent to which

you just say the first thing that comes

into your head

versus stopping to think about it for a

second

in order to investigate the relationship

between users cognitive style

and quality of information they share on

social media

i designed a hybrid lab field study

first i had about 2 000 twitter users

fill out the cognitive reflection test

then i pulled information from their

twitter profiles

including the websites they shared

content from then to measure the quality

of information they shared

i used a list of 60 news websites whose

trustworthiness

had been rated by professional fact

checkers as part of a previous study

here are the results for each news

website

i showed the average cognitive

reflection tester score of users who

tweet links to that website on the

x-axis

and i ensure the website’s fact-checker

trustworthiness rating on the y-axis

the size of each dot is proportional to

the number of tweets to that

outlet in our data set as you can see i

found a significant

and positive relationship between

cognitive reflection

and information quality users who rely

more on analytical thinking

are more likely to share content from

websites that professional fact-checkers

rate as more trustworthy this results is

robust controlling for a variety of

demographic factors

including education income and political

partisanship

the pattern shown here suggests that

sharing misinformation

is more about failing to think carefully

rather than thinking

in a motivated way so what does this

suggest

about potential solutions to the

misinformation problem

if lack of careful thinking leads people

to share low quality content

then getting users to think about

accuracy before they share

could help them to be more discerning we

built an experiment to test this idea

and show how it could be done by social

media platforms

we messaged more than 5 000 twitter

users who had previously shared

low quality content we asked the users

to rate the accuracy

of a single non-political item we are

not telling them that

accuracy is important that they should

take accuracy into account

or any kind of normative statements like

that instead

you’re just priming the concept of

accuracy

making accuracy top of mind so when they

go back to their news feed

they’re more likely just on their own to

think about accuracy

as they decide what to subsequently

share

as you might expect almost no one

responded to the message

but as soon as they see they are treated

in that the concept of accuracy

has been activated in their mind we then

collected all tweets

from before and after receiving the

message and quantify the quality of

information using the same website’s

fact-checker transworthiness rating

as in the previous study here’s what we

found

for each news website i showed the

website’s factual curse throughout

ordinance rating

on the x-axis and i showed the change in

fraction of tweets containing links to

that website on the y-axis

so positive values mean the message

increase

the website’s share of tweets and

negative values mean the message

decrease the website’s share of tweets

as you can see

we find clear evidence that accuracy

message made users more discerning in

their subsequent sharing

after getting the message users shared

proportionate more links to high quality

mainstream websites

and fewer links to hyper partisan fake

news websites

as rated by professional fact checkers

does this mean that we should all

immediately get online and start yelling

at anyone we see sharing misinformation

not necessarily

in the experiment that i just told you

about we were very careful

to not make people defensive but in a

follow-up experiment we found people who

had shared

false content and publicly corrected

them by replying to their tweet with a

link to a fact checking website

unlike our subtle accuracy nudge this

direct correction

actually decreased the quality of

information they subsequently share

these studies suggest that people share

misinformation

because they forget to think about how

accurate the content is

before they share it the issue isn’t

necessarily that

people are lazy thinkers in general

instead

there is reason to believe that social

media by design distracts us from

accuracy

by focusing our attention on social

factors such as how many likes your

posts will get

what comments people will make and so on

so

even people who under normal

circumstances think very carefully

may wind up mistakingly sharing

misinformation while online

this also means that platforms can

change their design

social media companies have the power to

focus attention on accuracy

and help immunize against misinformation

if

they so choose