Department of Health Law, Policy, & Management, Boston University School of Public Health.
School of Media & Strategic Communications, Oklahoma State University.
Health Commun. 2024 Sep;39(10):2041-2052. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2023.2254583. Epub 2023 Sep 6.
Pundits and scholars alike suspect that Facebook plays a role in not only exposing Americans to misinformation, but also encouraging them to seek out misinformation from other sources. Whether or not Facebook is responsible for stimulating misinformation search beyond the social networking site, however, is an open question. If Facebook encourages misinformation search behavior, we might expect search volume on other websites to simultaneously decrease when web traffic to Facebook is comparatively low. Here, we exploit a naturally-occurring and exogenous interruption to Facebook's service to study the site's impact on misinformation search. Difference-in-difference analyses reveal that minute-by-minute Google searches for pandemic misinformation (e.g., unproven COVID-19 remedies, vaccine conspiracy theories) tended to increase during the outage period, in comparison to a typical day (and vs. a placebo). These findings are less consistent with views that the site stimulates misinformation search, and more consistent with a steady and transferable demand for health misinformation. Our results showcase the importance of examining not only the supply side of misinformation, but also the demand side.
专家和学者都怀疑，脸书不仅让美国人接触到错误信息，而且还鼓励他们从其他来源寻找错误信息。然而，脸书是否对社交网络之外的错误信息搜索起到了刺激作用，这仍是一个悬而未决的问题。如果脸书鼓励错误信息搜索行为，那么当网站流量相对较低时，我们可能会预期其他网站的搜索量会同时下降。在这里，我们利用脸书服务的一次自然发生的、外生的中断，来研究该网站对错误信息搜索的影响。差异中的差异分析显示，与典型日（与安慰剂相比）相比，在中断期间，每分钟对大流行错误信息（例如未经证实的 COVID-19 疗法、疫苗阴谋论）的谷歌搜索量往往会增加。这些发现与认为该网站刺激错误信息搜索的观点不太一致，而与对健康错误信息的稳定且可转移的需求更为一致。我们的研究结果表明，不仅要检查错误信息的供应方，还要检查需求方。
