Tweeting false accusations of voter fraud as “debatable” does nothing to change the pre-existing beliefs of Trump voters, and may lead them to believe the lies, according to a new study.
The study, written by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor at Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sample of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December 2020. The researchers announced their age. -peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misconduct Review.
“These ‘controversial’ tags are meant to alert the reader to false/false content, so it’s surprising to find that they can have the opposite effect,” Norris said.
Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and were told to rate them on a scale of one to seven based on how truthful they were. see. A control group saw tweets without conflicting “tags”; the experimental group is looking at them with a label. Before and after seeing the tweets, subjects were also asked to rate their views on election fraud in general.
The study found that Trump voters who were initially skeptical about allegations of widespread fraud were more likely to take the lies as truth when a “controversial” letter appeared next to Trump’s tweets . Meanwhile, the results showed the beliefs of the Biden voters were not affected by the conflicting “tags”. Third-party voters or non-voters were less likely to believe false claims after reading four tweets with the tags.
Blanchard and Norris expected in their study that the contested tags would produce little conversion among Trump voters with high political knowledge, as previous research has shown that politically engaged people may dismiss attempts to correct in favor of their arguments. The researchers did not predict the opposite possibility: fixation as confirmation. The informed Trump candidates surveyed were so opposed to the reforms that the letters confirm that they have confirmed their belief in misinformation.
“Surprisingly, those Trump voters with higher political knowledge actually strengthened their belief in electoral malpractice when exposed to conflicting tags, compared to a control condition without the tags ,” Blanchard said. “Rather than being ineffective, the tags seemed to be useless, reinforcing misinformation among this group.”
Previous studies and research from disinformation experts have argued that directly challenging conspiracy theorists’ beliefs can have a negative effect, causing them to withdraw or suppress their beliefs. Although Blanchard and Norris say in the study that their findings are not conclusive that this fire effect is universal — as the sample of Trump patients in the study was very small — they are confident that conflicting tags do not work well in politics. Trump-savvy candidates are changing.
Social media has tried over the years to create different types of systems that flag users when content contains false, misleading or unverified claims. Twitter/X used to label tweets containing misinformation as “disputable”, a practice that in recent years has been replaced by “public information” for peer review and opinion. he was asked about measuring the content in general.
The bigger question that disinformation researchers have tried to answer is whether the labels and fact checks that try to debunk falsehoods actually work, in some studies to find out how likely these warnings are to be attacked. The field of research has implications for social media platforms, news outlets and measures aimed at preventing misinformation, especially at a time when political polarization is high and false accusations of fraud are options are available.
The authors assessed political knowledge by asking participants 10 questions to test a general understanding of US politics, such as: “What political office has John Roberts held?”
Another limitation of the study is the specific time it was conducted – the height of the 2020 election, when conservatives had opposing views on Twitter. Since the study was conducted, Twitter has not only removed controversial “tags” but has undergone extensive changes in ownership, content moderation and user feedback. After Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn in 2022 and renamed it X, the platform has brought back far-flung voices to the platform, including Trump himself, and taken the right path that has led critics to see in the right words. .
“We can’t pinpoint why the opposition tags were criticized among Trump voters, but mistrust of the platform may play a role,” Blanchard said. “Given the mistrust of Twitter at the time, it’s possible that Trump supporters saw the tags as a clear attempt to curb their independence, which led them to take down the misinformation. .”
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