Tokenization of social media engagements increases the sharing of false (and other) news but penalization moderates it.

ABSTRACT: Some major social media companies are announcing plans to tokenize user engagements, derived from blockchain-based decentralized social media. This would bring financial and reputational incentives for engagement, which might lead users to post more objectionable content. Previous research showed that financial or reputational incentives for accuracy decrease the willingness to share misinformation. However, it is unclear to what extent such outcome would change if engagements instead of accuracy were incentivized, which is a more realistic scenario. To address this question, we conducted a survey experiment to examine the effects of hypothetical token incentives. We find that a simple nudge about the possibility of earning token-based points for the achieved user engagements increases the

SUBMITTER: Alizadeh M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10444751 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature