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

Thomas Renault, David Restrepo Amariles and Aurore Troussel

Papers from arXiv.org

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.

Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02803 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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)
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:arx:papers:2404.02803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().