Labeling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds | Technology

Labeling tweets making false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs. In fact, it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by John Blanchard, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor at Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sample of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December 2020. The researchers published a peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review.

“These ‘disputed’ tags are intended to alert the reader to incorrect/misinformation, so it’s shocking to discover that they can have the opposite effect,” Norris said.

Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and were asked to rank them from one to seven based on their veracity. A control group saw the tweets without the “disputed” tags; the experimental group saw them with the label. Before and after viewing the tweets, subjects were also asked to rank their opinions about election fraud in general.

The study found that Trump voters who were initially skeptical of claims of widespread fraud were more likely to judge lies as true when a “disputed” label appeared next to Trump’s tweets. The findings, meanwhile, showed that Biden voters’ beliefs were largely unaffected by the “disputed” tags. Third-party voters or non-voters were slightly less likely to believe the false claims after reading the four tweets with the tags.

Blanchard and Norris had expected in their study that the contested labels would produce little change among politically knowledgeable Trump voters, since previous research has shown that politically informed people can reject correctives in favor of their own counterarguments. The researchers did not predict the opposite possibility: correcting as confirmation. The well-informed Trump voters they surveyed were so averse to corrections that the fact-checking labels actually reinforced their belief in disinformation.

“Surprisingly, when exposed to the contested tags, more politically knowledgeable Trump voters actually increased their belief in election misinformation, compared to a control group with no tags,” Blanchard said. “Rather than having no impact, the tags appeared to be counterproductive, reinforcing misinformation among this group.”

Previous studies and research by disinformation experts have argued that directly challenging conspiracy theorists’ beliefs can be counterproductive, leading them to retract or double down on their beliefs. While Blanchard and Norris argue in the study that their findings don’t necessarily prove that this counterproductive effect is universal—given the relatively small sample size of Trump voters in the study—they are more likely to argue that challenging tags become less effective as Trump voters become more politically informed.

Social media platforms have for years attempted to create various types of labeling systems that would alert users when content contains false, misleading, or unverified claims. Twitter/X previously labeled some tweets containing false information as “disputed,” a practice it has replaced in recent years with its “community notes” peer review feature and a more lax approach to content moderation in general.

A larger question that misinformation researchers have tried to answer is whether labels and fact-checks that attempt to debunk falsehoods are actually effective. Some research has found the potential for these warnings to backfire. The area of ​​research has implications for social media platforms, news outlets, and initiatives aimed at preventing misinformation, especially at a time when political polarization is high and false claims about election fraud are pervasive.

The authors assessed participants’ political knowledge by asking them 10 questions to test their general understanding of American politics, such as, “What political office does John Roberts hold now?”

One limitation of the study is the unique time frame in which it was conducted: the height of the 2020 election, when conservatives held more hostile views toward Twitter. Since the study was conducted, Twitter has not only removed the “contested” tags but also undergone a broader change in ownership, content moderation policies, and user attitudes. After Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded it as X, the platform has brought back far-right voices on the platform, including Trump himself, and taken a right-wing turn that has led conservatives to view it more positively.

“We can’t determine why contested tags backfired among Trump voters, but distrust of the platform may have played a role,” Blanchard said. “Given conservative distrust of Twitter at the time, it’s possible that Trump supporters saw the tags as a clear attempt to curtail their autonomy, prompting them to double down on disinformation.”