BWL XI: Paper accepted at CHI
A new research paper has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). CHI is the leading conference in human–computer interaction with a low acceptance rate (CORE Ranking A*).
Community Fact-Checks Trigger Moral Outrage in Replies to Misleading Posts on Social Media
CHI '25 (preprint available via arXiv)
Abstract: Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.