Image credit: Gordon Johnson, Pixabay (CC0)
In recent years, the amount of untrue information, or ‘misinformation’, shared online has increased rapidly. This can have profound effects on society and has been linked to violence, political extremism, and resistance to climate action.
One reason for the spread of misinformation is the lack of incentives for users to share true content and avoid sharing false content. People tend to select actions that they believe will lead to positive feedback (‘carrots’) and try to avoid actions that lead to negative feedback (‘sticks’). On most social media sites, these carrots and sticks come in the form of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ reactions, respectively. Stories that users think will attract ‘likes’ are most likely to be shared with other users. However, because the number of likes a post receives is not representative of how accurate it is, users share information even if they suspect it may not be accurate. As a result, misinformation can spread rapidly.
Measures aimed at slowing the spread of misinformation have been introduced to some social media sites, such as removing a few virulent spreaders of falsities and flagging misleading content. However, measures that change the incentive structure of sites so that positive and negative feedback is based on the trustworthiness of the information have not yet been explored.
To test this approach, Globig et al. set up a simulated social media site that included ‘trust’ and ‘distrust’ buttons, as well as the usual ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ options. The site featured up to one hundred news stories, half of which were untrue. More than 900 participants viewed the news posts and could react using the new buttons as well as repost the stories.
The experiment showed that participants used the ‘trust’ and ‘distrust’ buttons to differentiate between true and false posts more than the other options. As a result, to receive more ‘trust’ responses and less ‘distrust’ responses from other users, participants were more likely to repost true stories than false ones. This led to a large reduction in the amount of misinformation being spread. Computational modeling revealed that the participants were paying more attention to how reliable a news story appeared to be when deciding whether to repost it.
Globig et al. showed that adding buttons to highlight the trustworthiness of posts on social media sites reduces the spread of misinformation, without reducing user engagement. This measure could be easily incorporated into existing social media sites and could have a positive impact on issues that are often fuelled by misinformation, such as vaccine hesitancy and resistance to climate action.
