Researchers from MIT and the University of Regina have determined a way to keep social media users from sharing fake news stories about COVID-19. Social media companies could use the researchers\u2019 findings to limit the spread of false information on their platforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through a number of tests on social media users, the researchers found that, most often, people share false information about COVID-19 simply because they fail to think sufficiently about the accuracy of content before sharing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The researchers claim that, by design, social media platforms encourage rapid browsing of news headlines, elevate hot-topic news items and reward users who share and post eye-catching content by giving them likes, followers and shares, even if the information they share happens to be untrue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A slight \u201caccuracy nudge,\u201d however, could remind social media users to consider the concept of accuracy while they\u2019re scrolling and sharing on the platforms, the researchers suggest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe idea is, if you nudge them about accuracy at the outset, people are more likely to be thinking about the concept of accuracy when they later choose what to share. So then they take accuracy into account more when they make their sharing decisions,\u201d MIT professor David Rand<\/a>, a co-author of a new paper<\/a> detailing the findings, said in a news release<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Social media platforms could administer \u201caccuracy nudges\u201d in many ways. One suggestion the researchers brought up in the paper is the idea of periodically surveying users by asking them to rate the accuracy of randomly sampled news headlines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur treatment translates directly into a suite of real-world interventions that social media companies could easily deploy by periodically asking users to rate the accuracy of randomly sampled headlines,\u201d the authors wrote in the paper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To come to their conclusions, the researchers conducted two online experiments on a total of about 1,700 U.S. participants, who reflected the age, gender, ethnicity and geographic region diversities present in the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first experiment included 853 participants and used 15 true and 15 false news headlines about COVID-19 in the style of Facebook posts, with a headline, photo and initial sentence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The participants were split up into two groups. The first group was asked if they thought the headlines were accurate, and the second group was not asked about accuracy but instead about if they would consider sharing the posts on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first group correctly judged accuracy about two-thirds of the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For the second group, though, accuracy didn\u2019t seem to play a big role on how likely the posts were to be shared. The participants in the second group shared about half of the true stories and just under half of the false stories, so \u201ctheir judgment about which stories to share was almost random in regard to accuracy,\u201d according to the news release. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The second experiment, which included 856 other participants, used the same group of headlines and also split participants into two groups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first group was simply asked to look at the headlines and decide whether or not they would share them on social media. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The second group, however, was first asked to evaluate the accuracy of a non-COVID-19 headline before making a decision about the validity of the COVID-19 headlines. Taking this extra step of evaluating one non-COVID-19 headline made a big difference. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the \u201cdiscernment\u201d score of the second group, which is \u201cthe gap between the number of accurate and inaccurate stories they share,\u201d was nearly three times larger than that of the first group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The researchers also evaluated other factors that might impact the participants\u2019 response tendencies. They gave every participant a six-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), evaluated how much scientific knowledge each participant had and considered whether the participants were located close to COVID-19 outbreaks, among other things. Overall, they noticed that those who scored higher on the CRT and had vaster knowledge about science-rated headlines more accurately and shared fewer false headlines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The researchers interpret these findings to suggest that the way people assess news stories has more to do with broader cognitive habits and less to do with political partisanship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA lot of people have a very cynical take on social media and our moment in history, that we\u2019re post-truth and no one cares about the truth any more,\u201d Gordon Pennycook<\/a>, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Regina, said in the release. \u201cOur evidence suggests it\u2019s not that people don\u2019t care; it\u2019s more that they\u2019re distracted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe study<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n