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

TL;DR

Adding contextual information to potentially misleading social media posts significantly reduces their sharing and increases the likelihood of deletion, but the speed of fact-checking limits its overall effectiveness in curbing misinformation.

Contribution

This study provides the first large-scale causal analysis of how adding context impacts the spread of false news on social media.

Findings

Adding context halves retweet counts

Context increases deletion probability by 80%

Timing of context publication affects virality reduction

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.