The information processing of fake news: How intervention order influences perception over time

Our ability to recognize fake news is flawed, with serious negative consequences for individuals, organizations, and society. Researchers and practitioners have developed different interventions against fake news, such as warnings and additional information, with mixed results. Yet social media users remain vulnerable to fake news because they consume information hedonically. To design more effective interventions, we must better understand how social media users process information cognitively. Drawing on dual process theory, we hypothesize that the sequence of exposure to information matters, and that it is beneficial to present interventions with warnings and additional information after exposure to fake news rather than before. We argue that questioning false information typically requires more cognitive resources than users are willing to allocate during casual browsing. In a two-week multiphase experiment, participants were exposed to fake news and interventions in different sequences. We compared the results across groups and multiple time points through statistical testing. The results show that introducing an intervention after a fake news story leads to a lower adoption of fake news into social media users’ mental models and that the fake news’s believability is then lowest. However, the effect fades over time without repeated exposure to interventions. Our findings offer new insights into how timing and cognitive effort influence the effectiveness of fake news interventions. For practitioners, we provide recommendations for designing effective interventions against fake news.