![]() That is, there is a substantial disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions. We focused on COVID-19 misinformation, and began by replicating prior findings (Pennycook et al., 2021 Pennycook, McPhetres et al., 2020) that, in the absence of any intervention, headline veracity has little impact on sharing intentions - despite participants being fairly discerning when asked to judge the accuracy of the headlines. Here, we advance the applicability of accuracy prompt interventions by asking which such interventions are effective. This approach is also appealing from a practical perspective because accuracy prompts are scalable (unlike, for example, professional fact-checking, which is typically slow and only covers a small fraction of all news content Pennycook, Bear et al., 2020). Rather, emphasizing accuracy helps users exercise the (widely held see Pennycook et al., 2021) desire to avoid sharing inaccurate content, preserving user autonomy. ![]() This approach is particularly appealing because it does not require technology companies to decide (e.g., via machine learning or human moderators) what is true versus false. As a result, shifting attention towards accuracy can help people attend to their existing - but often latent - capacity and desire to discern truth from falsehood, for both political misinformation (Fazio, 2020 Jahanbakhsh et al., 2021 Pennycook et al., 2021) and COVID-19 misinformation (Pennycook, McPhetres et al., 2020). Recent work suggests that misinformation sharing often occurs, not because people purposefully share news they know is inaccurate, but because people are distracted or focused on other elements when deciding what to share. To that end, we explore the effectiveness of shifting users’ attention toward accuracy. Thus, it is especially important to prevent initial exposure. Here we focus on reducing the sharing of misinformation because simply being exposed to misinformation can increase subsequent belief (Pennycook et al., 2018). Of particular importance is identifying approaches that technology companies could directly use to combat online misinformation. The spread of inaccuracies on social media - including political “fake news” (Lazer et al., 2018 Pennycook & Rand, 2021) and COVID-19 misinformation (Pennycook, McPhetres et al., 2020) - is a topic of great societal concern and focus of academic research. From a practical perspective, our results suggest a menu of accuracy prompts that are effective in our experimental setting and that technology companies could consider testing on their own services.Finally, helping to illuminate the mechanism behind the effect, the prompts were more effective for participants who were more attentive, reflective, engaged with COVID-related news, concerned about accuracy, college-educated, and middle-aged. Furthermore, we found that gender, race, partisanship, and concern about COVID-19 did not moderate effectiveness, suggesting that the accuracy prompts will be effective for a wide range of demographic subgroups. We also found that another approach that seemed promising ex ante (descriptive norms) was ineffective. We identified three lightweight, easily-implementable approaches that each increased sharing discernment (the quality of news shared, measured as the difference in sharing probability of true versus false headlines) by roughly 50%, and a slightly more lengthy approach that increased sharing discernment by close to 100%.Participants received one of the treatments (or were assigned to a control condition), and then indicated how likely they would be to share a series of true and false news posts about COVID-19. Using survey experiments with N = 9,070 American social media users (quota-matched to the national distribution on age, gender, ethnicity, and geographic region), we compared the effect of different treatments designed to induce people to think about accuracy when deciding what news to share.Does the effectiveness of the accuracy prompts vary based on social media user characteristics? Assessing effectiveness across subgroups is practically important for examining the generalizability of the treatments and is theoretically important for exploring the underlying mechanism.Which approaches to shifting attention towards accuracy are most effective?. ![]() Here we examine the utility of a suite of different accuracy prompts aimed at increasing the quality of news shared by social media users. There is mounting evidence that inattention to accuracy plays an important role in the spread of misinformation online. ![]()
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