A simple list of tips that can be followed to check the accuracy of headlines on social media

(e.g., Be skeptical of headlines. False news stories often have catchy headlines in all caps with exclamation points. If shocking claims in the headline sound unbelievable, they probably are.).

This should appear either during the sharing of news articles, or as an intermittent reminder, or public-service-type announcement, from the platform itself to the user to bear the accuracy of headlines in mind.

People exposed to the tips were significantly more skeptical of false news stories.

It's noted in testing that users also became slightly more skeptical of legitimate news stories, but not nearly to the same degree.

Consistent with a prior hypothesis that media literacy interventions might reduce belief in false news stories, researchers from MIT in both the United States and in India exposed random participants to a media literacy intervention. In the study, participants were presented with reminders for how to gauge the accuracy of a news source.

Results from the first wave of the US study show a decrease of nearly 0.2 points on a 4-point scale, with a higher score denoting a stronger belief that the article is factual. Similar effects of the media literacy intervention are observed on the perceived accuracy of hyperpartisan headlines. The decrease in score suggests that participants, when prompted to think about accuracy in more actionable ways, were more critical of sharing articles in their newsfeed.

With the understanding that poor digital media literacy strongly correlates to belief in hoaxes and misinformation, finding a way to dispel falsehoods is critical to bringing users to a shared plane of understanding from which to cooperate. The authors of this study concluded that their findings were "largely encouraging" and that they suggest that, "relatively short, scalable interventions could be effective in fighting misinformation" globally.