Abstract
Social media companies have begun to use content-based alerts in their efforts to combat mis- and disinformation, including fact-check corrections and warnings of possible falsity, such as “This claim about election fraud is disputed.” Another harm reduction tool, source alerts, can be effective when a hidden foreign hand is known or suspected. This paper demonstrates that source alerts (e.g., “Determined by Twitter to be a Russian government account”) attached to pseudonymous posts can reduce the likelihood that users will believe and share political messages.
Highlights
To what extent do source alerts affect social media users’ tendency to believe and spread pseudonymous disinformation produced by foreign governments?
Are Democrats and Republicans likely to respond to source alerts that warn social media users about pseudonymous disinformation produced by foreign government sources?
We conducted an experiment via Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (October 22-23, 2020; N = 1,483) exposing subjects to Facebook and Twitter memes based on real disinformation in order to test the efficacy of using source alerts to reduce the tendency of social media users to believe, like, share, and converse offline about pseudonymous disinformation related to the 2020 presidential election
Summary
Finding 1: Source alerts do reduce social media users’ tendency to believe pseudonymous disinformation in most social media environments; no significant effect is found for Republican or Democratic Facebook users exposed to the general (“foreign government”) source alert. Democrats on Facebook acted more like Democrats and Republicans on Twitter, when we analyzed the effectiveness of source alerts on the tendency to believe disinformation and to spread disinformation online They responded to Republicans on Facebook, when we analyzed source alerts’ ineffectiveness to curb their tendency to spread disinformation online using Facebook’s “like” and “share” features, perhaps due to subtle differences in how Facebook users of both parties engage with information on the platform. There appears to be something distinct about Republicans who prefer Facebook as a platform for their social communications or how they engage with that specific social media environment This distinction could cause them to continue to perpetuate disinformation online and offline regardless of the company’s attempts to put source alerts in place to warn of pseudonymous foreign disinformation attempts.
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