Nevertheless, partisanship persisted: fake news warnings help briefly, but bias returns with time

Abstract

Politically oriented "fake news"-false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person-is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study. A warning that came before a false headline was initially very effective in both discouraging belief in false headlines generally and eliminating a partisan congruency effect (the tendency to believe politically congenial information more readily than politically uncongenial information). In the follow-up survey two weeks later, however, we found both high levels of belief in the articles and the re-emergence of a partisan congruency effect in all warning conditions, even though participants had known just two weeks ago the items were false. The new pre-warning before the headline showed some small improvements over other types, but did not stop people from believing the article once seen again without a warning. This finding suggests that warnings do have an important immediate impact and may work well in the short term, though the durability of that protection is limited.

Keywords: Fake news; False memory; Misinformation; Partisanship; Politics.

Fig. 1

Visual explanation of the sleeper effect for three hypothetical groups of people. The top group receives no information so they never believe it, the second only receives the information so they believe it (with some fading), and the last receives the information plus a cue that tells them not to trust the original information. We would expect that after the cue, if trusted, people would look like the top group and continue not believing the information, but instead their belief rises over time, getting closer to the group that never received the discounting cue

Fig. 2

How the “Warning-Before” for a false headline appeared to participants before clicking (left) and after clicking (right). True headlines would be in a similar style to the card on the right, while “Warning-During” false headlines had a similar red box below the headline (with the text referring to the “above study”), and the Warning-After were given similar text on the next page about the “previous study”

Fig. 3

Study procedures diagram

Fig. 4

Partisan participants’ ratings of the accuracy of politically congruent and incongruent fake news headlines at Time 1 and Time 2 based on warning condition. Error bars indicate one standard error of the mean

Fig. 5

Partisan participants’ ratings of the accuracy of politically congruent and incongruent true news headlines at Time 1 and Time 2 based on warning condition. Error bars indicate one standard error of the mean

Fig. 6

Belief in fake news accuracy by warning condition, time, and how confident the participant was in remembering, at Time 2, that they had seen that headline previously in the Time 1 survey