Truth decayDoes Correcting Online Falsehoods Make Matters Worse?

By Peter Dizikes

Published 21 May 2021

So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Well, there is evidence it can. A new study shows Twitter users post even more misinformation after other users correct them.

So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Allow us to respectfully offer evidence to the contrary.

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

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,” says 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. “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.

The paper’s authors are Mosleh; Cameron Martel, a PhD candidate at MIT Sloan; Dean Eckles, the Mitsubishi Career Development Associate Professor at MIT Sloan; and David G. Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at MIT Sloan.

From Attention to Embarrassment?
To conduct the experiment, the researchers first identified 2,000 Twitter users, with a mix of political persuasions, who had tweeted out any one of 11 frequently repeated false news articles. All of those articles had been debunked by the website Snopes.com. Examples of these pieces of misinformation include the incorrect assertion that Ukraine donated more money than any other nation to the Clinton Foundation, and the false claim that Donald Trump, as a landlord, once evicted a disabled combat veteran for owning a therapy dog.