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According to a study that was conducted in four countries, fact-checking helps to decrease false beliefs around the world.
Researchers discovered that fact-checking was effective in reducing variation in Argentina and South Africa, as well as in the U.K. Two weeks later, the positive effects were still evident.
Thomas Wood, assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University and co-author of this study, stated that there was no evidence for a "backfire effect" of fact-checking.
Wood stated that "when we began doing misinformation work around five years ago, there was consensus that correcting misinformation was not only ineffective but was actually aggravating the problem, and making people more ensconced in their false beliefs."
"We did not find any evidence in these countries. We did discover that fact-checking can be an effective tool to counter misinformation.
Wood collaborated with Ethan Porter (assistant professor of media and public relations at George Washington University). The results of the research were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 6, 2021.
Researchers worked with four fact-checking organisations in each country that are members of the International Fact-Checking Network. This organization promotes transparent and non-partisan fact-checking. Five fact-checks were evaluated for each country, and two were based on climate change and COVID-19.
In each country, fact-checks were done in September 2020 and October 2020. They covered a wide range of misinformation including politics and crime.
Some of the 2,000 participants received misinformation only, while others were provided with the correct information and corrections by local fact-checking agencies in response to the misinformation.
Then, they rated the extent to which they believed the false statement using a scale from 1-5.
Members of the control group were not given any misinformation or corrective messages in each country. Instead, they were asked to rate how true they believed the statements.
Comparing misinformation to fact-checking, each produced more accurate beliefs than misinformation. However, misinformation did not always produce less accurate beliefs as compared with the controls.
The results showed that fact-checks improved factual accuracy by.59 on the 5-point scale. The same scale showed that misinformation reduced factual accuracy by less then.07
Wood stated that misinformation is less persuasive than corrective and accurate information.
The researchers visited three countries, South Africa, Argentina, and the U.K. two weeks later to ask participants how strongly they believed the false statements that they had rated earlier. The positive effects of fact checking were evident two weeks later.
In all four countries, two topics were tested. The first was climate change. It tested how many people believed the false statement that there had been two years of record-breaking global warming between 2016 and 2018. Another test was to verify the false statement that saltwater could prevent the coronavirus from infecting, which was popularized near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The results showed that people were not less accurate when exposed to misinformation about climate change.
The misinformation about COVID-19 led to lower accuracy in three of four countries, and the largest misinformation effects in the study. The fact-checks helped improve accuracy on this topic.
Participants also took measures of their political beliefs to determine if they were affected by fact-checks.
The results showed that participants' reactions were linked to their beliefs. However, in no cases did an ideological group become less accurate because they were subject to corrections.
Wood stated that "some corrections didn’t improve the accuracy of some ideological groups, however they didn’t provoke any instances or backfire."
"All things considered, the beliefs held by adherents to the left, center, and right were more accurate when fact-checks were done, even when the topic was politically charged."
Wood pointed out that most studies suggesting fact-checking can backfire were done in the United States, and other countries similar to it. These are what researchers call WEIRD sample, which stands for Western, Educated. Industrialized. Rich.
These WEIRD countries, where political ideology is a major part of beliefs, can have a different behavior than those in other parts. Wood stated that the U.K. was the least WEIRD of the four countries and had the smallest corrective effects from fact-checking.
He stated that people from less ideological countries will be more factually averse.
Wood stressed that fact-checking is still valuable in four countries with different racial and economic backgrounds.
He said, "Fact-checking can be a powerful tool."
He said that these results are especially important given the increasing availability of COVID-19 vaccines in Africa. Although there may be misinformation regarding vaccine safety and efficacy, this study suggests that a thorough program of fact-checking via social media could prove to be very effective in removing falsehoods.
Wood stated that these populations might be more open to correcting misinformation than people from more developed, industrialized countries.
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More information: Evidence from simultaneous experiments conducted in Argentina, Nigeria and South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). Information from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: The global effectiveness of fact checking: Evidence from simultaneous experiments conducted in Argentina, Nigeria and South Africa (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2104235118
