O3C researcher Rachel Armitage has successfully defended her PhD thesis.
Her project was titled ‘Tackling misinformation on social media: limiting the spread of misleading UK political news online.’
Summary
In seeking to contribute to burgeoning efforts to limit the impact of online misinformation, this thesis explores how UK social media users might be dissuaded from sharing misleading political news online. It begins by examining the psychological factors that could predispose an individual to believe and/or share false information online, identifying worldview congruence, analytic cognitive style and sharing motivation as central components influencing such sharing behaviour. It then considers how different types of social media warning labels might interact with these variables to reduce propensity to believe and/or share misleading UK political news, including by shifting participants toward a more reflective analytic cognitive style.
These assumptions are accordingly tested via experiments embedded in online surveys, beginning with a small exploratory pilot study (n=94) designed to trial the survey materials and to assess whether reflective thinkers might be less susceptible to believing and sharing misleading political news in the UK context. Analysis of the pilot data reveals that this was generally the case, providing indicative support for a core assumption of the main study. Based on these results, a much larger survey (n=980) tests the effectiveness of four different warning labels at reducing belief in, and likelihood of sharing, misleading UK political news versus a baseline condition featuring the same misleading news without any label.
The analysis reveals four major findings: that misleading UK political news content is generally shared by social media users because they believe it; that avenues to successfully reduce such sharing seem to differ depending on the believability of the content in question; that only threatening consequences for sharing misleading information reduces sharing likelihood regardless of content believability and a users’ overall propensity to share news; and that while helpful in aiding users to recognise and reject misleading content, reflective thinking could not be primed by any of the warning labels and instead declined following treatment exposure.
These results can inform the development of successful social media interventions intended to limit the spread of misleading content, making a unique contribution to misinformation research by assessing not only the comparative effectiveness of different warning labels, but also under what circumstances, and for which social media users, they proved effective.
Rachel was among the first cohort of PhD students to join O3C following the grant award to Professor Andrew Chadwick. Her work was supervised by Dr Martin Sykora (School of Business and Economics), Professor Cristian Vaccari (Communication and Media), and Dr Cristian Tileaga (Communication and Media).
Rachel has a new job as Online Safety Policy Associate at Ofcom, working collaboratively to prepare for and deliver Ofcom's incoming regulatory powers relating to online safety. During her PhD research at Loughborough she held positions at Pattrn Analytics & Intelligence (a research spinout from The University of Oxford), and Adam Smith International working on consultancy projects related to tackling online disinformation.