Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news
Abstract
We build a novel database of around 285,000 notes from the Twitter Community Notes program to analyze the causal influence of appending contextual information to potentially misleading posts on their dissemination. Employing a difference in difference design, our findings reveal that adding context below a tweet reduces the number of retweets by almost half. A significant, albeit smaller, effect is observed when focusing on the number of replies or quotes. Community Notes also increase by 80% the probability that a tweet is deleted by its creator. The post-treatment impact is substantial, but the overall effect on tweet virality is contingent upon the timing of the contextual information's publication. Our research concludes that, although crowdsourced fact-checking is effective, its current speed may not be adequate to substantially reduce the dissemination of misleading information on social media.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2404.02803,
title = {Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news},
author = {Thomas Renault and David Restrepo Amariles and Aurore Troussel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.02803},
year = {2024}
}