Misinformation Content Warning

An interstitial that stops users from posting content confirmed to be misinformation.

How does this mitigate hate?

Social media content is highly saturated and rapidly consumed, making it difficult to differentiate between factual and misinformation content. This creates an easy way for bad actors to manipulate large audiences with disinformation or misinformation.

This pattern prevents content confirmed as misinformation from being posted, mitigating the overall viral spread of misinformation across the platform.

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When to use it?

Platforms that regularly experience misinformation content can implement this pattern to control the spread by preventing content that include confirmed misinformation to be posted.

Including this pattern before the issue arises could help to slow the spread of misinformation content and mitigate the influence of accounts that share misinformation content.

How does it work?

When making a post, users should be alerted if their post includes content that has been flagged as confirmed misinformation.

The user should not be allowed to post the content and should be asked to go back to edit out the misinformation content.

Advantages

Misinformation content on social media can be very harmful, and stopping any content that has been confirmed to be misinformation is an effective way to screen and reduce the generation of harmful content on the platform.

Tracking the interactions of users with this pattern would provide useful data for identifying its effectiveness – such as whether the user attempted to change a specific word, reword the entire phrase itself, or game the system by attempting to manipulate words to dodge the word detection.

Disadvantages

Users who try to post misinformation content might attempt to game the system by manipulating words to dodge the word detection. Also, if the detection system mislabels harmless content as misinformation, it can cause frustration for the user.

References

Arechar, Antonio A., Jennifer N. L. Allen, adam berinsky, Rocky Cole, Ziv Epstein, Kiran Garimella, Andrew Gully, et al. 2022. “Understanding and Combating Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents.” PsyArXiv. February 11. doi:10.31234/osf.io/a9frz.

Saltz, Emily, Tommy Shane, Victoria Kwan, Claire Leibowicz, and Claire Wardle. “It Matters How Platforms Label Manipulated Media. Here Are 12 Principles Designers Should Follow.” First Draft, June 10, 2020. https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/it-matters-how-platforms-label-manipulated-media-here-are-12-principles-designers-should-follow/.

Pro Social Network. “Preliminary Flagging before Posting.” www.prosocialdesign.org, n.d. https://www.prosocialdesign.org/library/preliminary-flagging-before-posting.