Developing an accuracy-prompt toolkit to reduce COVID-19 misinformation online

Abstract

Recent research suggests that shifting users’ attention to accuracy increases the quality of news they subsequently share online. Here we help develop this initial observation into a suite of deploy-able interventions for practitioners. We ask (i) how prior results generalize to other approaches for prompting users to consider accuracy, and (ii) for whom these prompts are more versus less effec-tive. In a large survey experiment examining participants’ intentions to share true and false head-lines about COVID-19, we identify a variety of different accuracy prompts that su¬ccessfully increase sharing