Realtime user ratings as a strategy for combatting misinformation: an experimental study

Because fact-checking takes time, verdicts are usually reached after a message has gone viral and interventions can have only limited effect. A new approach recently proposed in scholarship and piloted on online platforms is to harness the wisdom of the crowd by enabling recipients of an online message to attach veracity assessments to it. The intention is to allow poor initial crowd reception to temper belief in and further spread of misinformation. We study this approach by letting 4000 subjects in 80 experimental bipartisan communities sequentially rate the veracity of informational messages. We find that in well-mixed communities, the public display of earlier veracity ratings indeed enhances the correct classification of true and false messages by subsequent users. However, crowd intelligence backfires when false information is sequentially rated in ideologically segregated communities. This happens because early raters’ ideological bias, which is aligned with a message, influences later raters’ assessments away from the truth. These results suggest that network segregation poses an important problem for community misinformation detection systems that must be accounted for in the design of such systems.