Reducing misinformation sharing at scale using digital accuracy prompt ads
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interventions to reduce misinformation sharing have been a major focus in recent years. Developing “content-neutral” interventions that do not require specific fact-checks or warnings related to individual false claims is particularly important in developing scalable solutions. Here, we provide the first evaluations of a content-neutral intervention to reduce misinformation sharing conducted at scale in the field. Specifically, across two on-platform randomized controlled trials, one on Meta’s Facebook (N=33,043,471) and the other on Twitter (N=75,763), we find that simple messages reminding people to think about accuracy—delivered to large numbers of users using digital advertisements—reduce misinformation sharing, with effect sizes on par with what is typically observed in digital advertising experiments. On Facebook, in the hour after receiving an accuracy prompt ad, we found a 2.6% reduction in the probability of being a misinformation sharer among users who had shared misinformation the week prior to the experiment. On Twitter, over more than a week of receiving 3 accuracy prompt ads per day, we similarly found a 3.7% to 6.3% decrease in the probability of sharing low-quality content among active users who shared misinformation pre-treatment. These findings suggest that content-neutral interventions that prompt users to consider accuracy have the potential to complement existing content-specific interventions in reducing the spread of misinformation online.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".