Social correction of fake news across party lines

Social corrections, wherein social media users correct one another, are an important mechanism for debunking online misinformation. But users who post misinformation only rarely engage with social corrections, instead typically choosing to ignore them. Here, we investigate how the social relationship between the corrector and corrected user affect the willingness to engage with corrective, debunking messages. We explore two key dimensions: (i) partisan agreement with, and (ii) social relationship between, the user and the corrector. We conducted a randomized field experiment with N=1,586 Twitter users and a conceptual replication survey experiment with N=812 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers in which posts containing false news were corrected. We varied whether the corrector identified as Democrat or Republican; and whether the corrector followed the user and liked three of their tweets the day before issuing the correction (creating a minimal social relationship). Surprisingly, we found that shared partisanship did not increase a user’s probability of engaging with the correction. Conversely, forming a minimal social connection significantly increased engagement rate. A second survey experiment (N = 1,621) found that minimal social relationships foster a general norm of responding, such that people feel more obligated to respond – and think others expect them to respond more – to people who follow them, even outside the context of misinformation correction. These results emphasize social media’s ability to foster engagement with corrections via minimal social relationships, and have implications for effective, engaging fact-check delivery online.