Chair for Data Science & Digitalization
- Contact Person
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- Featured Research: Community-Based Fact-Checking Reduces the Spread of Misleading Posts on Social Media
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Social media platforms increasingly rely on community-based fact-checking systems such as X’s Community Notes to combat misinformation at scale. In this study, we analyze more than 431 million reposts across 237,180 fact-checked cascades and provide large-scale causal evidence that community notes reduce the subsequent spread of misleading posts by 61.2% on average. We further find that community notes increase the likelihood that users delete misleading posts by 94.3%. However, notes often appear too late to prevent the early, most viral stage of diffusion, limiting their overall system-wide impact. Our findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of community-based fact-checking systems in reducing misinformation on social media.
- Research paper at Nature Communications (open access)
- Interview with FAZ
- Media Coverage (selection): The Washington Post, The Atlantic, TIME Magazine, ABC News, Poynter, BBC
- Featured Research: Negativity Drives Online News Consumption
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Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here, we analyze the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N = 22,743). Our dataset comprises ∼105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated ∼5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3% Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media.
- Research paper at Nature Human Behaviour
- Media coverage (selection): ARD, FAZ, Heise, Deutschlandfunk, ORF, Psychology Today, The Atlantic
