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The Power of the Crowd

How the Public Can Both Spoil and Improve Social Media as a Source of Information

Expected online publication date:  30 September 2025

Florian Stöckel
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Sabrina Stöckli
Affiliation:
Bern University of Applied Sciences
Benjamin A. Lyons
Affiliation:
University of Utah
Hannah Kroker
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Jason Reifler
Affiliation:
University of Southampton

Summary

This Element explores misinformation as a challenge for democracies, using experiments from Germany, Italy, and the UK to assess the role of user-generated corrections on social media. A sample of more than 170,000 observations across a wide range of topics (COVID, climate change, 5G etc.) is used to test whether social corrections help reduce the perceived accuracy of false news and whether miscorrections decrease the credibility of true news. Corrections reduce the perceived accuracy of misinformation, but miscorrections can harm perceptions of true news. The Element also assesses the mechanisms of social corrections, finding evidence for recency effects rather than systematic processing. Additional analyses show the characteristics of individuals who have more difficulties identifying false news. Survey data is included on characteristics of people who write comments often. The conclusion highlights that social corrections can mislead, but also work as remedy. The Element ends with best practices for effective corrections.

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Element
Information
Online ISBN: 9781009677165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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