Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news

Thomas Renault, David Restrepo Amariles, and Aurore Troussel

Summary

Abstract

We build a novel database of around 285,000 notes from the Twitter Community Notes program to analyze the causal influence of appending contextual information to potentially misleading posts on their dissemination. Employing a difference in difference design, our findings reveal that adding context below a tweet reduces the number of retweets by almost half. A significant, albeit smaller, effect is observed when focusing on the number of replies or quotes. Community Notes also increase by 80% the probability that a tweet is deleted by its creator. The post-treatment impact is substantial, but the overall effect on tweet virality is contingent upon the timing of the contextual information's publication. Our research concludes that, although crowdsourced fact-checking is effective, its current speed may not be adequate to substantially reduce the dissemination of misleading information on social media.

Journal

ArXiV

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Cite This Paper

Renault, T., Amariles, D. R., & Troussel, A. (2024). Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.02803.

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