Simple Interventions Can Help Inhibit the Spread of Fake News about Climate Change

fake news;social media;climate change;School for Environment and Sustainability

Lutzke, LaurenDrummond, Caitlin ;

University of Michigan

关键词: fake news;    social media;    climate change;    School for Environment and Sustainability;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/148818/Lutzke_Lauren_Thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Since the period leading to and following the American election cycle of 2016, a variety of sources havewarned that people in the U.S. are being exposed to fake news. In light of this problem, our study testedthe effect of exposure to guidelines (for evaluating the credibility of news online) on a person’sassessment of real and fake news about climate change on Facebook. Through an online experiment (n =2,750 participants), we tested two conditions and a control. Those in our Guidelines condition readguidelines for evaluating news online while participants in our Enhanced Guidelines condition read thesame guidelines and rated them in terms of how important each guideline would be for evaluating newsonline. The control group was not exposed to guidelines at all. Then, participants were shown a Facebookpost containing either real or fake news about climate change and asked to evaluate the post in terms of itstrustworthiness, and how likely they would be to like or share the post on Facebook. Our results show thatparticipants in both conditions were less likely to trust, like, or share fake climate news compared to thecontrol group. Encouragingly, these interventions did not reduce a participant’s likelihood to trust, like, orshare real climate news. Both conditions had consistently small effect sizes for each dependent variable(trusting, liking, and sharing). However, even if exposure to guidelines only has a small chance ofreducing a person’s likelihood to trust, like, or share fake news, that small probability could still provokemeaningful behavior change if a population as massive as all U.S. internet users were to experience ourinterventions