Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

@article{Clayton2019RealSF,
  title={Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media},
  author={Katherine Clayton and Spencer Blair and Jonathan A. Busam and Samuel Forstner and John Glance and Guy Green and Anna Kawata and Akhila Kovvuri and Jonathan Martin and Evan Morgan and M. Sandhu and Rachel Sang and Rachel Scholz-Bright and Austin T. Welch and Andrew G. Wolff and Amanda Zhou and B. Nyhan},
  journal={Political Behavior},
  year={2019},
  pages={1-23}
}
Social media has increasingly enabled “fake news” to circulate widely, most notably during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. These intentionally false or misleading stories threaten the democratic goal of a well-informed electorate. This study evaluates the effectiveness of strategies that could be used by Facebook and other social media to counter false stories. Results from a pre-registered experiment indicate that false headlines are perceived as less accurate when people receive a… Expand
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