Nevertheless, partisanship persisted: fake news warnings help briefly, but bias returns with time.

ABSTRACT: Politically oriented "fake news"-false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person-is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study. A warning that came before a false headline was initially very effective in both discouraging belief in false headlines generally and eliminating a partisan congruency effect (the tendency to believe politically congenial in

SUBMITTER: Grady RH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8299168 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature