Listening to Crowdsourced Fact-Checking

Recently, crowdsourcing has been proposed as a tool for fighting misinformation online. Will internet users listen to crowdsourced fact-checking? In this experiment we test whether participants follow others’ opinion to evaluate the validity of a science-themed Facebook post, and examine which factors mediate the use of this information. Participants observed a post presenting scientific (mis-)information, along with a graphical summary of previous participants’ judgements. Even tough most participants reported not having used information from previous raters, their responses were influenced by previous assessments. This happened regardless of whether prior judgements were accurate or misleading. Presenting crowdsourced fact checking however did not translate into the blind copying of the majority response. Rather, participants tended to use this social information as a cue to guide their response, while also relying on individual evaluation and research for extra information. Tempering the idea that people are indiscriminate social learners blindly copying others, these results highlight the role of individual reasoning when assessing information online.