Promoting engagement with social fact-checks online: Investigating the roles of social connection and shared partisanship.

ABSTRACT: Social corrections - where users correct each other - can help rectify inaccurate beliefs. However, social corrections are often ignored. Here we ask under what conditions social corrections promote engagement from corrected users, allowing for greater insight into how users respond to debunking messages (even if such responses are negative). Prior work suggests two key factors may help promote engagement with corrections - partisan alignment between users, and social connections between users. We investigate these factors here. First, we conducted a field experiment on Twitter (X) using human-looking bots to examine how shared partisanship and prior social connection affect correction engagement. We randomized whether our accounts identified as Democrat or Republican, and whether they fol

SUBMITTER: Martel C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11957346 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature