Simple Interventions Can Help Inhibit the Spread of Fake News about Climate Change

Abstract

Since the period leading to and following the American election cycle of 2016, a variety of sources have warned that people in the U.S. are being exposed to fake news. In light of this problem, our study tested the effect of exposure to guidelines (for evaluating the credibility of news online) on a person’s assessment of real and fake news about climate change on Facebook. Through an online experiment (n = 2,750 participants), we tested two conditions and a control. Those in our Guidelines condition read guidelines for evaluating news online while participants in our Enhanced Guidelines condition read the same guidelines and rated them in terms of how important each guideline would be for evaluating news online. The control group was not exposed to guidelines at all. Then, participants were shown a Facebook post containing either real or fake news about climate change and asked to evaluate the post in terms of its trustworthiness, and how likely they would be to like or share the post on Facebook. Our results show that participants in both conditions were less likely to trust, like, or share fake climate news compared to the control group. Encouragingly, these interventions did not reduce a participant’s likelihood to trust, like, or share real climate news. Both conditions had consistently small effect sizes for each dependent variable (trusting, liking, and sharing). However, even if exposure to guidelines only has a small chance of reducing a person’s likelihood to trust, like, or share fake news, that small probability could still provoke meaningful behavior change if a population as massive as all U.S. internet users were to experience our interventions