ABSTRACT

Fake news poses a substantial threat to society, with serious negative consequences. Therefore, we investigate how people can be encouraged to report fake news and support social media platform providers in their actions against misinformation. Based on social psychology, we hypothesize that social norms encourage social media users to report fake news. In two experiments, we present participants a news feed which contains multiple real and fake news stories while at the same time exposing them to injunctive and descriptive social norm messages. Injunctive social norms describe what behavior most people approve or disapprove. Descriptive social norms refer to what other people do in certain situations. The results reveal, among other things, that highlighting the socially desired behavior of reporting fake news using an injunctive social norm leads to higher reporting rates for fake news. In contrast, descriptive social norms do not have such an effect. Additionally, we observe that the combined application of injunctive and descriptive social norms results in the most substantial reporting behavior improvement. Thus, social norms are a promising socio-technical remedy against fake news.

摘要

假新闻对社会构成重大威胁，带来严重的负面影响。因此，我们调查了如何鼓励人们举报虚假新闻并支持社交媒体平台提供商采取行动以防止误传信息。基于社会心理学，我们假设社会规范鼓励社会媒体用户举报虚假新闻。在两个实验中，我们为参与者提供了一个新闻提要，其中包含多个真实和虚假的新闻故事，同时将其暴露于禁令和描述性的社会规范信息。禁令性的社会规范描述了大多数人赞成或反对的行为。描述性社会规范是指他人在某些情况下的行为。结果表明，除其他外，强调使用禁令性社会规范来报道假新闻的社会期望行为会导致假新闻的报道率更高。相反，描述性社会规范没有这种效果。此外，我们观察到禁令性和描述性社会规范的组合应用会导致最实质性的报告行为改善。因此，社会规范是对假新闻的一种有前途的社会技术补救措施。