Labelling Trump's lies as 'disputed' on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds [View all]

Related: Trump, Twitter, and truth judgments: The effects of “disputed” tags and political knowledge on the judged truthfulness of election misinformation (Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review)

________________________________________________

Source: The Guardian

Labelling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds

Study says tagging posts with false claims on election fraud may make Trump voters more likely to think they’re true

Nick Robins-Early
Fri 20 Sep 2024 11.00 BST
Last modified on Fri 20 Sep 2024 11.02 BST

Labelling tweets featuring false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs, and it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study.

The study, authored by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sampling of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December of 2020. The researchers published a peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review.

“These ‘disputed’ tags are meant to alert a reader to false/misinformation, so it’s shocking to find that they may have the opposite effect,” Norris said.

Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and told to rank them from one to seven based on their truthfulness. A control group saw the tweets without “disputed” tags; the experimental group viewed them with the label. Before and after seeing the tweets, the subjects were also asked to rank their views on election fraud overall.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/20/trump-tweets-false-label-credibility-supporters