Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Development Innovation Lab, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2024 May;8(5):823-834. doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01810-7. Epub 2024 Mar 18.
How can we induce social media users to be discerning when sharing information during a pandemic? An experiment on Facebook Messenger with users from Kenya (n = 7,498) and Nigeria (n = 7,794) tested interventions designed to decrease intentions to share COVID-19 misinformation without decreasing intentions to share factual posts. The initial stage of the study incorporated: (1) a factorial design with 40 intervention combinations; and (2) a contextual adaptive design, increasing the probability of assignment to treatments that worked better for previous subjects with similar characteristics. The second stage evaluated the best-performing treatments and a targeted treatment assignment policy estimated from the data. We precisely estimate null effects from warning flags and related article suggestions, tactics used by social media platforms. However, nudges to consider the accuracy of information reduced misinformation sharing relative to control by 4.9% (estimate = -2.3 percentage points, 95% CI = [-4.2, -0.35]). Such low-cost scalable interventions may improve the quality of information circulating online.
我们如何在大流行期间引导社交媒体用户在分享信息时具有辨别力？在肯尼亚（n=7498）和尼日利亚（n=7794）的 Facebook Messenger 用户中进行的一项实验测试了旨在减少分享 COVID-19 错误信息意图而不减少分享真实信息意图的干预措施。研究的初始阶段包括：（1） 具有 40 种干预组合的析因设计；（2） 上下文自适应设计，增加了对以前具有相似特征的主题效果更好的处理的分配概率。第二阶段评估了表现最好的治疗方法和从数据中估计的有针对性的治疗分配策略。我们准确估计了警告标志和相关文章建议的零效应，这些标志和建议是社交媒体平台使用的策略。然而，提示考虑信息的准确性使错误信息的分享相对控制组减少了 4.9%（估计值=-2.3 个百分点，95%置信区间=-4.2 到-0.35）。这种低成本的可扩展干预措施可能会提高在线传播信息的质量。
