Fact-Checked Content Labeling
Platforms should label truthful content as fact-checked.
How does this mitigate hate?
Studies find that labeling posts as factual and verified helps people to become more skeptical of other posts that are not labeled. By labeling accurate content and not labeling misinformation, instances of sharing and viral spread are likely to decrease.
When to use it?
Use when there are enough resources for fact-checking and verifying content. When content, articles, memes and other user generated material is shared, especially at scale, it becomes easy for people to be misled by misinformation.
People will trust their friends and others like them, believing they are sharing valid information.
It is important to call out and identify, consistently, content that has been fact checked as true or truthful and label it as so, in order to train people not to blindly accept what they see online as fact.
How does it work?
Placing a label on content that has been fact check, helps raise the credibility of the content. Labeling fact-checked content helps separate true content from false misinformation.
Over time, platforms can suppress false content and misinformation in the stream. Studies are showing that as people see content labeled for fact-checking, they become more suspect of content that is not labeled.
Advantages
Labeling fact-checked content can help train people to approach unlabeled content with skepticism. Fact-checking can help platforms suppress fake news, misinformation and false content helping educate users and exposing them to truthful information.
Disadvantages
Fact-checking content and labeling it as false or partially false may cause some users to try work arounds through changing words or other phrases that are captured by the fact-checking process.
Other users may complain that fact-checking and suppressing false content is censorship.
Examples
Facebook screens showing labeling of fact-checked content.
References
Muhammed T, S., & Mathew, S. K. (2022). The disaster of misinformation: a review of research in social media. International journal of data science and analytics, 13(4), 271–285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-022-00311-6
Pennycook, Gordon, Adam Bear, Evan T Collins, and David G Rand. “The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines without Warnings.” Management Science 66 (2020): 4944–57. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3478.
Resnick, Paul, Aljohara Alfayez, Jane Im, and Eric Gilbert. “Informed Crowds Can Effectively Identify Misinformation.” CoRR abs/2108.07898 (2021). https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07898.