Reducing Younger and Older Adults’ Engagement with COVID-19 Misinformation: The Effects of Accuracy Nudge and Exogenous Cues

Abstract

COVID-19 misinformation got a lot of engagement on social media, which has been a big threat to public health and international relations. Therefore, this study designed an accuracy nudge intervention to induce people to discern misinformation and adopted exogenous cues to reinforce their discernment ability. The two interventions were expected to reduce people’s engagement in COVID-19 misinformation. To test the hypothesis, 80 younger adults and 80 older adults completed this experiment. As expected, the accuracy nudge motivated people to judge misinformation to a large extent. Most of the participants (91.3%) voluntarily used the accuracy nudge, which also decreased the sharing of misinformation by 62.7%. While the intervention combining the accuracy nudge and exogenous cues did not work better than any single intervention in reducing misinformation engagement. Besides, older adults tend to like or share articles that just rely on their glance at headlines, which may account for their vulnerability to misinformation.