Appealing to Sense and Sensibility: System 1 and System 2 Interventions for Fake News on Social Media

Patricia Moravec, Antino Kim, Alan R. DennisInformation Systems网络安全UTD24

Information Systems Research2020-08-13The University of Texas at Austin; Health Decision Technologies (United States); Indiana University BloomingtonDOI

Citations164

Disinformation on social media—commonly called “fake news”—has become a major concern around the world, and many fact-checking initiatives have been launched in response. However, if the presentation format of fact-checked results is not persuasive, fact-checking may not be effective. For instance, Facebook tested the idea of flagging dubious articles in 2017 but concluded that it was ineffective and removed the feature. We conducted three experiments with social media users to investigate two different approaches to implementing a fake news flag—one designed to be most effective when processed by automatic cognition (System 1) and the other designed to be most effective when processed by deliberate cognition (System 2). Both interventions were effective, and an intervention that combined both approaches was about twice as effective. The awareness training on the meaning of the flags increased the effectiveness of the System 2 intervention but not the System 1 intervention. Believability influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment, and share). Our results suggest that both theoretical routes can be used—separately or together—in the presentation of fact-checking results in order to reduce the influence of fake news on social media users.

DisinformationSocial mediaFlaggingPresentation (obstetrics)Computer scienceSensibilityMeaning (existential)Internet privacyIntervention (counseling)MisinformationPsychological interventionMicroblogging