Community Fact-Checks Trigger Moral Outrage in Replies to Misleading Posts on Social Media

TL;DR

This study shows that displaying community fact-checks on misleading social media posts increases negative and morally outraged reactions, highlighting the emotional impact of debunking misinformation.

Contribution

It provides causal evidence that community fact-checks evoke stronger negative and moral emotions in replies, informing design of fact-checking systems.

Findings

Negativity in replies increased by 7.3%

Anger in replies increased by 13.2%

Moral outrage increased by 16.0%

Abstract

Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.