Two Yale University researchers won't be sending up balloons any time soon. Their study said fake-news labeling from Facebook has not had much of an impact.
The researchers set out to determine, what is the payoff from the fact-check program? They were mindful that tagging fake articles with "Disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers" warnings and making articles' sources more salient by adding publisher logos were two approaches.
Findings: "With respect to disputed warnings, we find that tagging articles as disputed did significantly reduce their perceived accuracy relative to a control without tags, but only modestly (d=.20, 3.7 percentage point decrease in headlines judged as accurate)."
Alas, their survey of 7,500 people showed little impact, after assessing the effect of these interventions on perceptions of accuracy across seven experiments (total N=7,534).
Levi Sumagaysay is editor of SiliconBeat. He also reported what they found—that tagging news as "disputed by third-party fact-checkers" made participants only 3.7 percentage points more apt to determine headlines were actually false.
The study is from David Rand and Gordon Pennycook.
