Social media ’trust’/’distrust’ buttons could reduce spread of misinformation

Social media - iStock The addition of 'trust' and 'distrust' buttons on social media, alongside standard 'like' buttons, could help to reduce the spread of misinformation, finds a new experimental study led by UCL researchers. Incentivising accuracy cut in half the reach of false posts, according to the findings published in eLife. Co-lead author, Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences, Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) said: "Over the past few years, the spread of misinformation, or 'fake news', has skyrocketed, contributing to the polarisation of the political sphere and affecting people's beliefs on anything from vaccine safety to climate change to tolerance of diversity. Existing ways to combat this, such as flagging inaccurate posts, have had limited impact. "Part of why misinformation spreads so readily is that users are rewarded with 'likes' and 'shares' for popular posts, but without much incentive to share only what's true. "Here, we have designed a simple way to incentivise trustworthiness, which we found led to a large reduction in the amount of misinformation being shared." In another recent paper, published in Cognition , Professor Sharot and colleagues found that people were more likely to share statements on social media that they had previously been exposed to, as people saw repeated information as more likely to be accurate, demonstrating the power of repetition of misinformation.