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Framing fact-checks as a “confirmation” increases engagement with corrections of misinformation: a four-country study - Scientific Reports

Previous research has extensively investigated why users spread misinformation online, while less attention has been given to the motivations behind sharing fact-checks. This article reports a four-country survey experiment assessing the influence of confirmation and refutation frames on engagement with online fact-checks. Respondents randomly received semantically identical content, either affirming accurate information (“It is TRUE that p”) or refuting misinformation (“It is FALSE that not p”). Despite semantic equivalence, confirmation frames elicit higher engagement rates than refutation frames. Additionally, confirmation frames reduce self-reported negative emotions related to polarization. These findings are crucial for designing policy interventions aiming to amplify fact-check exposure and reduce affective polarization, particularly in critical areas such as health-related misinformation and harmful speech.

Playing Gali Fakta inoculates Indonesian participants against false information | HKS Misinformation Review

Although prebunking games have shown promise in Western and English-speaking contexts, there is a notable lack of research on such interventions in countries of the Global South. In response to this gap, we developed Gali Fakta, a new kind of media literacy game specifically tailored for an Indonesian audience. Our findings indicate that participants who

Personal Network Composition and Cognitive Reflection Predict Susceptibility to Different Types of Misinformation

Despite a rapid increase in research on the underpinnings of misinformation susceptibility, scholars still disagree about the relative impacts of social context and individual cognitive factors. We argue that cognitive reflection and identity-based network homogeneity may have unique influences on different types of misinformation. Specifically, identity-based network homogeneity predicts bias that is related to any type of identity-based information (i.e., political rumors), and cognitive reflection is more tailored toward truth discernment (i.e., fake news headlines). We conducted our study using an online sample (N = 214) split evenly between Democrats and Republicans and collected data on personal network composition, cognitive reflection, as well as susceptibility, sentiments, and sharing behavior in relation to political rumors and misinformation, respectively. Results demonstrate that where network homogeneity predicts belief and sharing in both political rumors and fake news headlines, cognitive reflection only predicts belief and sharing of fake news headlines. Social vs. cognitive factors for predicting different types of misinformation are discussed.