Two Truths and a Lie: Exploring Soft Moderation of COVID-19 Misinformation with Amazon Alexa

TL;DR

This study investigates how voice assistants like Amazon Alexa influence the perception of COVID-19 misinformation, revealing that warnings may be ineffective for vaccine-hesitant users and that political beliefs impact trust and information accuracy perception.

Contribution

It is the first to examine the impact of soft moderation warnings delivered via voice assistants on COVID-19 misinformation perception.

Findings

Warning covers may not be effective when spoken back by Alexa.

Vaccine-hesitant users tend to ignore warnings aligned with their beliefs.

Politically independent users trust Alexa less and perceive information more accurately.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyzed the perceived accuracy of COVID-19 vaccine Tweets when they were spoken back by a third-party Amazon Alexa skill. We mimicked the soft moderation that Twitter applies to COVID-19 misinformation content in both forms of warning covers and warning tags to investigate whether the third-party skill could affect how and when users heed these warnings. The results from a 304-participant study suggest that the spoken back warning covers may not work as intended, even when converted from text to speech. We controlled for COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and political leanings and found that the vaccination hesitant Alexa users ignored any type of warning as long as the Tweets align with their personal beliefs. The politically independent users trusted Alexa less then their politically-laden counterparts and that helped them accurately perceiving truthful COVID-19 information. We discuss soft moderation adaptations for voice assistants to achieve the intended effect of curbing COVID-19 misinformation.