Submitted by asbruckman t3_yu22hj in science
Reply to comment by OrbitalATK in People who post stories marked false by Snopes on Reddit fall into five groups: Reason to Disagree, Changed Belief, Steadfast Non-Standard Belief, Sharing to Debunk, and Sharing for Humor. Reducing misinformation requires different approaches for each group. by asbruckman
I agree it would be nice. We unfortunately couldn't share the specific stories, because the subjects in the study are anonymous and if we name the stories then we identify the people who posted them.
There are a few generalized descriptions of the stories in the paper.
> There are a few generalized descriptions of the stories in the paper.
Ah, I found it buried within some of the sections - though, not really enough information is provided for many of the descriptions to actually determine the validity of the story. May be better to focus on individuals who all posted the same, factually incorrect, story?
On another note, which I think is important to mention, I'd be quite hesitant to trust the validity of the demographic information in the study - as we all know, many misrepresent who they are on this platform.
> not really enough information is provided for many of the descriptions to actually determine the validity of the story
You're saying you think Snopes is wrong to label at least some of those stories as fact-checked to be found false?
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> You're saying you think Snopes is wrong to label at least some of those stories as fact-checked to be found false?
Some of them, not at all- they are clearly false. Not enough information is provided from quite a few of them to actually determine what the story even is.
I've found when there's not enough information Snopes is very good at pointing out there's not enough information. It sounds like you disagree with that?
Do you not trust the OP who said "the specific stories in the study were not borderline—they were provably wrong"?
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> I've found when there's not enough information Snopes is very good at pointing out there's not enough information. It sounds like you disagree with that?
Sure, Snopes can provide decent information on a topic, but making a blanket statement of that always been the case has not been my experience utilizing them. Therefore, as the authors do not provide the actual Snopes sources, no, I cannot make the conclusion that the individual stories on Snopes sufficiently explained the topic.
> Do you not trust the OP who said "the specific stories in the study were not borderline—they were provably wrong"?
I believe the authors should provide the stories that were shared, instead for providing vague snippets for many of them (while some others were certainly false). A potential solution, which I mentioned before, would instead be conducting interviews on individuals who shared the same provably false story (for example, vaccine misinformation).
It’s a nice idea. But all the people who shared X is an identifiable group? And also, not enough folks share the same story to make a study.
> But all the people who shared X is an identifiable group?
I guess if the goal was to understand why they posted misinformation, and then see what the reaction would be to presenting the user with information that is the case.
> And also, not enough folks share the same story to make a study.
I've certainly seen articles (with misinformation) posted hundreds of times (the 'other discussion' page is quite helpful at finding that). I bet you could find at least 21 individuals for that (since that was the sample size here).
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How exactly would knowing the specific misinformation stories, lead to the identities of random online people who posted them?
Misinformation, like about vaccines or the elections, have been shared millions of times, by millions of people online.
Are these stories you selected so rare and unique, that we would be able to find the persons used in the study if we searched the stories?
Why would you select such specific misinformation, that it is impossible to even reveal what it is, for your study?
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