Fighting „Fake News“: Fact Checking and Trust in (Online) Information Sources

Tasks

Social media have grown into a global force with enormous reach and have recently evoked deep concerns about the emergence and spread of misinformation. How can we fight “fake news” on social media? Which policies help users to identify false information? How can we increase trust in reliable news sources and precaution against “fake news”? Finding good answers to these questions is one of the major societal challenges of the upcoming decade.

One popular response to these questions is the promotion of “fact checkers.” However, it is not entirely clear whether this policy works as intended. While a growing literature examines how fact checking affects the corrected messages themselves, spillover effects on untagged messages and the impact of fact checking on trust in (online) information sources themselves have received little attention.

The main objective of this research project is to derive a sophisticated understanding of the full effect of fact checking on trust in messages from (online) information sources. In particular, we will analyze how fact checking affects trust in tagged and untagged messages from (online) information sources and how it affects trust in those sources themselves. To this end, we develop a behavioral economic model that conceptualizes our main ideas and lets us derive our hypotheses. Then, we conduct a two-step randomized online experiment to test our predictions.