Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.
@article{arxiv.2409.08829,
title = {Community Fact-Checks Trigger Moral Outrage in Replies to Misleading Posts on Social Media},
author = {Yuwei Chuai and Anastasia Sergeeva and Gabriele Lenzini and Nicolas Pröllochs},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08829},
year = {2025}
}