Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news. - HEC Paris - École des hautes études commerciales de Paris
Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2024

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

Résumé

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.

Dates et versions

hal-04759221 , version 1 (29-10-2024)

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Copyright (Tous droits réservés)

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Citer

Thomas Renault, David Restrepo-Amariles, Aurore Troussel. Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news.. 2024. ⟨hal-04759221⟩

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UNIV-PARIS1 HEC
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