Testing the Effectiveness of Correction Placement and Type on Instagram

By Emily K. Vraga, Sojung Claire Kim, John Cook, Leticia Bode. 2020

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite concerns about misinformation across social media platforms, little attention has been paid to how to correct misinformation on visual platforms like Instagram. This study uses an experimental design on a national sample to test two features of user-based correction strategies on Instagram for a divisive issue on which misinformation abounds: the issue of climate change. First, we unite the inoculation and correction literature to test the efficacy of prebunking corrections that come before exposure to the misinformation versus debunking strategies that occur after exposure. Second, we compare fact-focused corrections that provide accurate information to rebut the misinformation against logic-focused corrections that highlight the rhetorical flaw underpinning the misinformation. Our findings suggest that these strategies intersect to reduce misperceptions. Logic-focused corrections effectively reduce misperceptions regardless of their placement before or after the misinformation, and appear to function in part by reducing perceptions of the credibility of the misinformation post. Fact-focused corrections only reduce misperceptions when they occur after the misinformation, but are seen as more credible than logic-focused corrections. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the theoretical mechanism by which correction can occur and the practical guidelines to best correct misinformation in visual social media spaces.

Subfields: Communication, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/616ec061f31779cc468d8ff6a830fe8740fd3ee3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Emily K. Vraga
2. Leticia Bode
3. Elmie Nekmat

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Joanne M. Miller
2. Emily K. Vraga
3. Leticia Bode

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Emily K. Vraga
2. Leticia Bode
3. Joanne M. Miller
4. Elmie Nekmat

Citations in the corpus

• Correction Experiences on Social Media During COVID-19 (2021, background): “This is true for both relatively entrenched issues like the safety of flu vaccination, and for emerging issues like the spread of Zika in 2016, as well as across multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Bode & Vraga, 2015; Smith & Seitz, 2019; van der Meer & Jin, ”
• Psychological, Political, and Situational Factors Combine to Boost COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs (2020, background): “Corrective attempts that confront logical fallacies or provide factual information (Vraga et al., 2020) may be effective in the short term.”
• The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, unknown): “Individuals have the ability to make a difference online: Corrections from users, experts, and algorithms (e.g., recommending related articles that contain a correction) can all be effective in reducing community misperceptions when responding to misinformation 103, 104, 105 .”