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

Thomas Renault, David Restrepo-Amariles () and Aurore Troussel ()
Additional contact information
David Restrepo-Amariles: HEC Paris
Aurore Troussel: HEC Paris

No 1519, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

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)
JEL-codes: K10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2024-04-19
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4800565 Full text (text/html)

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:ebg:heccah:1519

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4800565

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann ().