Correction by distraction: how high-tempo music enhances medical experts’ debunking TikTok videos

Abstract

The spread of multimodal coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) misinformation on social media poses considerable public health risks. Yet limited research has addressed the efficacy of citizen-contributed, multimodal debunking messages, especially the roles of audiovisual structural features. In a between-subject online experiment, we assessed the impacts of misleading TikTok videos promoting the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility and compared the effectiveness of debunking videos from medical experts vs. laypeople. We independently varied the presence of background music. Results showed that while misleading TikTok videos increased misperceptions, most debunking videos effectively countered such misinformation. Notably, compared with laypeople’s testimonial corrections, expert didactic videos benefited more from incorporating high-tempo background music, primarily through the suppression of counterarguing rather than through enhanced encoding. These findings underscore the importance to consider audiovisual structural features, such as background music, as well as the cognitive pathway through distracted counterarguing, in future research on multimodal misinformation and correction.