Twitter’s Disputed Tags May Be Ineffective at Reducing Belief in Fake News and Only Reduce Intentions to Share Fake News Among Democrats and Independents

Abstract

Throughout the 2020 US elections, one of Twitter’s defenses against misinformation was its “This claim has been disputed” tags. The utility of such tags, however, remains unclear. A survey-based experiment, meant to simulate the Twitter environment, with a convenience sample of 318 US participants found that while disputed tags reduced the sharing of misinformation among Democrats and Independents, they had no effect on the sharing habits of Republicans and did not reduce belief in fake news for any group. We also found that higher scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (a measure of analytical rather than intuitive thinking) correlated with lower belief in fake news, but had no relationship with sharing habits. Further, conservatism positively correlated with belief in and sharing intentions for tagged false headlines, but not untagged false headlines or true headlines. Our results suggest that the tags employed by Twitter to combat the spread of fake news may have been ineffective at reducing belief in fake news, and may only have attenuated fake news sharing among Democrats and Independents.