Community notes increase trust in fact-checking on social media

PNAS Nexus . 2024 May 31;3(7):pgae217. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae217 
 
 
 Community notes increase trust in fact-checking on social media

 
 Chiara Patricia Drolsbach 
 Chiara Patricia Drolsbach 

 
 1 
JLU Giessen, 35394 Giessen, Germany 
 Find articles by Chiara Patricia Drolsbach 
 
 
 1 , Kirill Solovev 
 Kirill Solovev 

 
 2 
JLU Giessen, 35394 Giessen, Germany 
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 2 , Nicolas Pröllochs 
 Nicolas Pröllochs 

 
 3 
JLU Giessen, 35394 Giessen, Germany 
 Find articles by Nicolas Pröllochs 
 
 
 3, b, ✉ 
 
 Editor: David Rand 
 
 
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 1 
JLU Giessen, 35394 Giessen, Germany 
 
 2 
JLU Giessen, 35394 Giessen, Germany 
 
 3 
JLU Giessen, 35394 Giessen, Germany 
 
 
 ✉ To whom correspondence should be addressed: Email: nicolas.proellochs@wi.jlug.de 

 
 
 b 
 Competing Interest: The authors declare no competing interest.

 
 
 Roles

 
 David Rand : Editor 
 
 
 Received 2023 Dec 3; Accepted 2024 May 14; Collection date 2024 Jul.

 
 
 © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences. 
 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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 PMCID: PMC11212665  PMID: 38948016 
 
 Abstract

 Community-based fact-checking is a promising approach to fact-check social media content at scale. However, an understanding of whether users trust community fact-checks is missing. Here, we presented n = 1,810 Americans with 36 misleading and nonmisleading social media posts and assessed their trust in different types of fact-checking interventions. Participants were randomly assigned to treatments where misleading content was either accompanied by simple (i.e. context-free) misinformation flags in different formats (expert flags or community flags), or by textual “community notes” explaining why the fact-checked post was misleading. Across both sides of the political spectrum, community notes were perceived as significantly more trustworthy than simple misinformation flags. Our results further suggest that the higher trustworthiness primarily stemmed from the context provided in community notes (i.e. fact-checking explanations) rather than generally higher trust towards community fact-checkers. Community notes also improved the identification of misleading posts. In sum, our work implies that context matters in fact-checking and that community notes might be an effective approach to mitigate trust issues with simple misinformation flags.

 Keywords: misinformation, fact-checking, trust, social media

 
 Significance Statement.

 Social media providers have been called upon to develop effective countermeasures to combat the spread of misinformat

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