Flagging False Facebook Posts as Satire Helps Reduce Belief

Participants were shown two Facebook posts with the inaccurate statements that they were asked about two weeks earlier (illegal votes cast in the 2016 election and Russian vote tampering).

Each participant received one of three flags at the bottom of each of the posts: One that said it was disputed by fact-checkers, a second that said other Facebook users like them disputed it, or a third that said it was from a humor, parody or hoax site. A fourth group of participants did not receive any flag on their posts.

Results showed that people who received the flags saying fact-checkers or their peers disputed the post still believed the falsehoods just as much as they did earlier. Further, they were still likely to say they would share the false information.

But the people who received the flag saying the post was meant as humor were more likely to change their minds. They were less likely to believe the falsehood and were less likely than others to say they would share it.

“There’s little reason not to label satire,” co-author Poulsen said.

“The best jokes are still funny even when you know they’re jokes. More importantly, labeling can help people who might otherwise be misled.”

Garrett added that the finding isn’t trivial, given that there is a lot of satire being shared on social media.

The researchers did a second study, with a larger (610 people) and more demographically diverse sample. The study was similar, although not exactly the same, and had the same general results, Garrett said.

Although it wasn’t the focus of the study, Garrett noted another important result: There was no “backfire” effect from the Facebook flags, in which people are more likely to believe false information if they are told it is false. Some early research in the area suggested there might be such an effect.

“Flagging falsehoods did not always result in more accurate beliefs, but it never resulted in less accuracy among our participants,” he said.

While most fact-checking flags did not work in this study, Garrett said he isn’t ready to say they can’t be effective. But they may need to be tweaked.

Garrett said he suspects that one reason the satire flags worked is that they told people why a certain statement was false – because it was meant as humor.

“When you just say a claim is false, you haven’t really given an explanation for why,” he said.

“People respond to stories. They want to know why something is being called inaccurate.”

So saying, “This content has been found to be foreign propaganda” might be more effective than just saying, “This content has been found to be false.”

“If you give people a clear explanation as to why you’re calling a statement ‘false,’ that may be more compelling to people,” Garrett said.