Aslett Kevin, Guess Andrew M, Bonneau Richard, Nagler Jonathan, Tucker Joshua A
Center for Social Media and Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Sci Adv. 2022 May 6;8(18):eabl3844. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abl3844.
As the primary arena for viral misinformation shifts toward transnational threats, the search continues for scalable countermeasures compatible with principles of transparency and free expression. We conducted a randomized field experiment evaluating the impact of source credibility labels embedded in users' social feeds and search results pages. By combining representative surveys ( = 3337) and digital trace data ( = 968) from a subset of respondents, we provide a rare ecologically valid test of such an intervention on both attitudes and behavior. On average across the sample, we are unable to detect changes in real-world consumption of news from low-quality sources after 3 weeks. We can also rule out small effects on perceived accuracy of popular misinformation spread about the Black Lives Matter movement and coronavirus disease 2019. However, we present suggestive evidence of a substantively meaningful increase in news diet quality among the heaviest consumers of misinformation. We discuss the implications of our findings for scholars and practitioners.
随着病毒式错误信息的主要传播领域转向跨国威胁,人们继续寻找与透明度和言论自由原则相兼容的可扩展应对措施。我们进行了一项随机实地实验,评估嵌入用户社交动态和搜索结果页面中的来源可信度标签的影响。通过结合来自一部分受访者的代表性调查(n = 3337)和数字痕迹数据(n = 968),我们对这种干预措施对态度和行为的影响进行了罕见的生态有效测试。在整个样本中,平均而言,3周后我们无法检测到来自低质量来源的新闻在现实世界中的消费变化。我们也可以排除对关于“黑人的命也是命”运动和2019年冠状病毒病的流行错误信息的感知准确性的微小影响。然而,我们提供了一些暗示性证据,表明在错误信息的重度消费者中,新闻消费质量有实质性的显著提高。我们讨论了我们的研究结果对学者和从业者的影响。