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Who reports witnessing and performing corrections on social media in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and France?

Rongwei Tang, Emily K. Vraga, Leticia Bode and Shelley Boulianne

Observed corrections of misinformation on social media can encourage more accurate beliefs, but for these benefits to occur, corrections must happen. By exploring people’s perceptions of witnessing and performing corrections on social media, we find that many people say they observe and perform corrections across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France.

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Research Note

User experiences and needs when responding to misinformation on social media

Pranav Malhotra, Ruican Zhong, Victor Kuan, Gargi Panatula, Michelle Weng, Andrea Bras, Connie Moon Sehat, Franziska Roesner and Amy Zhang

This study examines the experiences of those who participate in bottom-up user-led responses to misinformation on social media and outlines how they can be better supported via software tools. Findings show that users desire support tools designed to minimize time and effort in identifying misinformation and provide tailored suggestions for crafting responses to misinformation that account for emotional and relational context.

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Research Note

Did the Musk takeover boost contentious actors on Twitter?

Christopher Barrie

After his acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk pledged to overhaul verification and moderation policies. These events sparked fears of a rise in influence of contentious actors—notably from the political right. I investigated whether these actors did receive increased engagement over this period by gathering tweet data for accounts that purchased blue-tick verification before and after the Musk takeover.

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How effective are TikTok misinformation debunking videos?

Puneet Bhargava, Katie MacDonald, Christie Newton, Hause Lin and Gordon Pennycook

TikTok provides opportunity for citizen-led debunking where users correct other users’ misinformation. In the present study (N=1,169), participants either watched and rated the credibility of (1) a misinformation video, (2) a correction video, or (3) a misinformation video followed by a correction video (“debunking”).

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Examining accuracy-prompt efficacy in combination with using colored borders to differentiate news and social content online

Venya Bhardwaj, Cameron Martel and David G. Rand

Recent evidence suggests that prompting users to consider the accuracy of online posts increases the quality of news they share on social media. Here we examine how accuracy prompts affect user behavior in a more realistic context, and whether their effect can be enhanced by using colored borders to differentiate news from social content.

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Measuring the effect of Facebook’s downranking interventions against groups and websites that repeatedly share misinformation

Emmanuel M. Vincent, Héloïse Théro and Shaden Shabayek

Facebook has claimed to fight misinformation notably by reducing the virality of posts shared by “repeat offender” websites. The platform recently extended this policy to groups. We identified websites and groups that repeatedly publish false information according to fact checkers and investigated the implementation and impact of Facebook’s measures against them.

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Research Note

Research note: Examining how various social media platforms have responded to COVID-19 misinformation

Nandita Krishnan, Jiayan Gu, Rebekah Tromble and Lorien C. Abroms

We analyzed community guidelines and official news releases and blog posts from 12 leading social media and messaging platforms (SMPs) to examine their responses to COVID-19 misinformation. While the majority of platforms stated that they prohibited COVID-19 misinformation, the responses of many platforms lacked clarity and transparency.

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Misinformation interventions are common, divisive, and poorly understood

Emily Saltz, Soubhik Barari, Claire Leibowicz and Claire Wardle

Social media platforms label, remove, or otherwise intervene on thousands of posts containing misleading or inaccurate information every day. Who encounters these interventions, and how do they react? A demographically representative survey of 1,207 Americans reveals that 49% have been exposed to some form of online misinformation intervention.

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