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Saturday, October 19, 2019

New Facebook study by Garrett and Poulsen in JCMC

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Kelly Garrett
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Shannon Poulsen
In their new paper "Flagging Facebook falsehoods: Self-identified humor warnings outperform fact checker and peer warnings" in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Kelly and Shannon present two studies evaluating the effectiveness of flagging inaccurate political posts on social media. In Study 1, they tested fact-checker flags, peer-generated flags, and a flag indicating that the publisher self-identified as a source of humor. Conducting a 2-wave online experiment (N=218), they found that self-identified humor flags were most effective, reducing beliefs and sharing intentions, especially among those predisposed to believe the post. They found no evidence that warnings from fact checkers or peers were beneficial. Compared to the alternatives, participants exposed to self-identified humor flags exhibited less reactance to and had more positive appraisals of the flagging system. The second study replicated the findings of the first and provides a preliminary test of what makes this flag work.

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