Journalistic interventions matter: Understanding how Americans perceive fact-checking labels

Statements of fact can be proved or disproved with objective evidence, whereas statements of opinion depend on personal values and preferences. Distinguishing between these types of statements contributes to information competence. Conversely, failure at fact-opinion differentiation potentially brings resistance to corrections of misinformation and susceptibility to manipulation.

Through an online field experiment, we test traditional and novel counter-misinformation strategies among fringe communities. Though generally effective, traditional strategies have not been tested in fringe communities, and do not address the online infrastructure of misinformation sources supporting such consumption. Instead, we propose to activate source criticism by exposing sources’ unreliability.

Using data from a nationally representative survey of 2,036 U.S. adults, we analyze partisan perceptions of the risk disinformation poses to the U.S. government and society, as well as the actors viewed as responsible for and harmed by disinformation. Our findings indicate relatively high concern about disinformation across a variety of societal issues, with broad bipartisan agreement that disinformation poses significant risks and causes harms to several groups.

A growing number of educational interventions have shown that students can learn the strategies fact checkers use to efficiently evaluate online information. Measuring the effectiveness of these interventions has required new approaches to assessment because extant measures reveal too little about the processes students use to evaluate live internet sources.

In this study, we used a two-wave panel and a real-world intervention during the 2017 UK general election to investigate whether fact-checking can reduce beliefs in an incorrect campaign claim, source effects, the duration of source effects, and how predispositions including political orientations and prior exposure condition them.

Several social media employ or consider user recruitment as defense against misinformation. Yet, it is unclear how to encourage users to make accurate evaluations. Our study shows that presenting the performance of previous participants increases discernment of science-related news. Making participants aware that their evaluations would be used by future participants had no effect on accuracy.