Nudging punishment against sharing of fake news

Biljana Meiske, Amalia Álvarez-Benjumea, Giulia Andrighetto and Eugenia Polizzi

European Economic Review, 2024, vol. 168, issue C

Abstract: Corrective comments posted in response to misinformation shared on social media are not only effective in reducing belief in misinformation among those observing the interaction but also serve as a publicly observable social punishment against fake news sharing. We suggest that, by visibly displaying punishing behavior, corrective comments have the potential to function as a norm nudge, updating observers’ perception of the norms regulating punishment, the so-called “meta-norms”. We conducted a preregistered online experiment in which participants joined discussions resembling an online forum and could comment on posts shared by previous users. We manipulated participants’ possibility to observe corrective comments replying to a post sharing fake news and measured the effect of this variation on their propensity to leave a corrective comment. We show that participants exposed to posts corrected by other users are significantly more likely to reply with a corrective comment, even after controlling for participants’ perceived accuracy of the shared post. Participants exposed to the corrections provided by previous users perceive replying with corrections as more socially appropriate. Our results suggest that social corrections work as a (meta) norm nudge, increasing the probability of punishing norm violations by increasing the social appropriateness of correcting. Our findings suggest that interventions targeting “would-be” enforcers could complement existing policies specifically directed at norm violators.

Keywords: Social norms; Social media; Fake news; Punishment; Norm-nudges (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D8 L82 L86 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292124001247
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:168:y:2024:i:c:s0014292124001247

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104795

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().