A Comparative Evaluation of Interventions Against Misinformation: Augmenting the WHO Checklist

TL;DR

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the WHO COVID-19 misinformation checklist through experiments in the US and Germany, highlighting the importance of source labels and proposing an interactive version to improve misinformation detection.

Contribution

It offers a comparative analysis of the WHO checklist's utility across countries and introduces an interactive version to enhance user engagement and effectiveness.

Findings

Source labels were most followed and helpful.

Performance varied significantly between US and Germany.

Interactive version reduced effort in verifying information.

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization provided a checklist to help people distinguish between accurate and misinformation. In controlled experiments in the United States and Germany, we investigated the utility of this ordered checklist and designed an interactive version to lower the cost of acting on checklist items. Across interventions, we observe non-trivial differences in participants' performance in distinguishing accurate and misinformation between the two countries and discuss some possible reasons that may predict the future helpfulness of the checklist in different environments. The checklist item that provides source labels was most frequently followed and was considered most helpful. Based on our empirical findings, we recommend practitioners focus on providing source labels rather than interventions that support readers performing their own fact-checks, even though this recommendation may be influenced by the WHO's chosen order. We discuss the complexity of providing such source labels and provide design recommendations.