European Business Schools Librarian's Group
HEC Research Papers Series,
HEC Paris
No 1519: Collaboratively adding context to social media posts reduces the sharing of false news.
Thomas Renault (), David Restrepo-Amariles () and Aurore Troussel ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Renault: Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
David Restrepo-Amariles: HEC Paris
Aurore Troussel: HEC Paris
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.
Keywords: Content moderation; Fake news; Information diffusion; Social media
JEL-codes: K10
17 pages, April 19, 2024
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