“Engagement With Fact-Checked Posts on Reddit”, Robert M. Bond, R. Kelly Garrett2023-01-27 ()⁠:

[data] False stories shared on Twitter diffuse more rapidly and widely than true stories. However, whether this pattern holds across other social media platforms is an open question.

Here, we investigate user engagement with posts eliciting fact-checking comments on Reddit.

In contrast to prior work, we find that posts eliciting comments that include fact-checks indicating the information is true tend to receive more engagement across a variety of metrics than do posts eliciting comments that include fact-checks indicating the information is false.

This result is consistent with the interpretation that there are important platform-level differences in how message veracity influences engagement and diffusion.

Contested factual claims shared online are of increasing interest to scholars and the public. Characterizing temporal patterns of sharing and engagement with such information, as well as the effect of sharing associated fact-checks, can help us understand the online political news environment more fully.

Here, we investigate differential engagement with fact-checked posts shared online via Reddit 2016–22018. The data comprise ~29,000 conversations, ~849,000 users, and ~9.8 million comments. We classified the veracity of the posts being discussed as true, mixed, or false using 3 fact-checking organizations.

Regardless of veracity, fact-checked posts had larger and longer lasting conversations than claims that were not fact-checked. Among those that were fact-checked, posts rated as false were discussed less and for shorter periods of time than claims that were rated as true. We also observe that fact-checks of posts rated as false tend to happen more quickly than fact-checks of posts rated as true. Finally, we observe that thread deletion and removal are systematically related to the presence of a fact-check and the veracity of the fact-check, but when deletion and removal are combined the differences are minimal.

Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

[Keywords: contested news, social media, engagement, fact-checks]

See Also: