The Nuance

Photo by Nghia Nguyen on Unsplash

At a Republican Party fundraiser in 2019, former President Donald Trump talked about American energy policy.

After endorsing higher domestic production of fossil fuels, he spoke derisively about alternative energy sources, including wind power. “They say the noise causes cancer,” he said of wind turbines.

The comment drew criticism from wind-energy advocates. It also spurred at least one credulous research analysis into the link between wind turbines and cancer. (That analysis found that living near turbines “does not appear to increase cancer incidence.”)

While the cancer comment doesn’t stand out amid the forest of dubious Trump statements, it’s a prime example of one of the former President’s favorite rhetorical devices: the “I heard” hedge. As the Washington Post and others have observed, Trump loves to preface his more controversial assertions with “I heard,” “people are saying,” and other they-said-it-not-me qualifiers. It’s a nifty trick. If challenged to defend or explain his remarks, he can argue, honestly, that he never claimed what he said was true. He was merely repeating something he heard.

Accuracy endorsements sidestep the weaknesses of top-down attempts to police news content.

New research finds that this sort of accountability dodge may underlie the spread of fake news.

For a study published last month in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers examined whether certain types of accuracy prompts could affect how people share news on social media. In one of their experiments, they added a few simple words to an article’s share button: “I think this news is accurate.”

The effect of that addition was remarkable. People were roughly 40% less likely to share fake news links. They were also about 25% more likely to share real news content.

“Accuracy endorsements make people more carefully consider their sharing decisions,” says Valerio Capraro, PhD, first author of the study and a senior lecturer in economics at Middlesex University in London.

But that’s not all they do. Capraro’s study also looked at some previously tested accuracy prompts, including one that asked people to “Remember that it could be fake news” before sharing a link. Unlike the accuracy endorsement, the “fake news” reminder only modestly lowered a person’s willingness to share bogus content. Unhelpfully, it also reduced the sharing of real news.

That’s a problem. “Increasing real news sharing is as important, if not more so, as decreasing fake news sharing,” Capraro says. For a prompt to thrive in the wild — that is, for it to appease the almighty algorithms that rule over our social media worlds — people have to keep sharing content with one another. An accuracy prompt that reduces sharing is probably DOA.

The ultimate goal is for our social feeds to be populated by legitimate information, not a bunch of crazy bullshit. It seems that asking people to vouch for the accuracy of the stuff they’re sharing — in effect to own it, and to drop the “I just heard this, don’t know if it’s true” cover favored by the former President — may get us a lot closer to that ideal.

‘It is impossible to keep pace with the amount of misinformation that is created every second.’

Accuracy endorsements also neatly sidestep the weaknesses of top-down attempts to police news content.

“Top-down fact-checking is problematic at two levels,” Capraro says. One of them is technical: “It is impossible to keep pace with the amount of misinformation that is created every second,” he says. The other is ideological: “Users may feel their freedom is being threatened if social media [companies] remove misinformation.”

This ideological problem may be insurmountable. As social media platforms have attempted to crack down on spurious content, revolts among users — who have valid concerns about bias and first-amendment rights — have given rise to fringe social platforms filled with even more baloney. We’re lurching toward an ever-more fractured and compartmentalized ecosystem of online news, which is bad for our democracy and also for our health and pocketbooks. (According to a 2021 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, vaccine misinformation and disinformation cause 300 deaths and cost the American economy at least $50 million per day.)

Just about everyone recognizes that fake news poses a big threat to our collective welfare. Solutions are needed, and fast.

Capraro’s work on accuracy endorsements needs to be further validated and stress-tested. (He acknowledges that, as people get used to them, accuracy prompts may lose some of their potency.) But the larger truth revealed in his experiments is likely to hold up: If we want trustworthy information, we’re going to have to police ourselves.