Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news

Thomas Renault, David Restrepo-Amariles and Aurore Troussel
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David Restrepo-Amariles: HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales
Aurore Troussel: HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales

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Abstract: We build a novel database of around 285,000 notes from the Twitter Community Notes program to analyze the causal influence of appending contextual information to potentially misleading posts on their dissemination. Employing a difference in difference design, our findings reveal that adding context below a tweet reduces the number of retweets by almost half. A significant, albeit smaller, effect is observed when focusing on the number of replies or quotes. Community Notes also increase by 80% the probability that a tweet is deleted by its creator. The post-treatment impact is substantial, but the overall effect on tweet virality is contingent upon the timing of the contextual information's publication. Our research concludes that, although crowdsourced fact-checking is effective, its current speed may not be adequate to substantially reduce the dissemination of misleading information on social media.

Keywords: Content moderation; Fake news; Information diffusion; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04-19
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Working Paper: Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news (2024)
Working Paper: Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04759221

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4800565

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