Community Fact-Checks Trigger Moral Outrage in Replies to Misleading Posts on Social Media
arXiv:2409.08829 · doi:10.1145/3706598.3713909
Abstract
Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.
Conditionally accepted at CHI2025
References in corpus (15)
- The science of fake news
- Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh: Roles and Responsibilities as Perceived by Journalists, Fact-checkers, and Users
- Are Deepfakes Concerning? Analyzing Conversations of Deepfakes on Reddit and Exploring Societal Implications
- Investigating Differences in Crowdsourced News Credibility Assessment: Raters, Tasks, and Expert Criteria
- Crowdsourced Fact-Checking at Twitter: How Does the Crowd Compare With Experts?
- Did the Roll-Out of Community Notes Reduce Engagement With Misinformation on X/Twitter?
- Ideological differences in engagement in public debate on Twitter
- Assessing enactment of content regulation policies: A post hoc crowd-sourced audit of election misinformation on YouTube
- A Comparative Evaluation of Interventions Against Misinformation: Augmenting the WHO Checklist
- What Do We Mean When We Talk about Trust in Social Media? A Systematic Review
- New threats to society from free-speech social media platforms
- A Browser Extension for in-place Signaling and Assessment of Misinformation
- "Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet": An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms' Content Moderation Policies
- Believability and Harmfulness Shape the Virality of Misleading Social Media Posts
- Against the Others! Detecting Moral Outrage inSocial Media Networks