Attempting to correct online falsehoods may make matters worse

The findings of a recent study suggests that Twitter users post even more misinformation after other users correct them, which might lead to more spread of false information on social media. According to the new study discussed during Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which was coauthored by a group of MIT scholars, not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it might lead to even less accurate information and more toxicity from the people being corrected.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” said Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results. Mosleh added, “After a user was corrected ... they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

The paper, "Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment," has been published online in CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.