Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook

被引：38

作者：

Allen, Jennifer ^{[1
]}

Watts, Duncan J. ^{[2
,3
,4
]}

Rand, David G. ^{[1
,5
,6
]}

机构：

[1] MIT, Sloan Sch Management, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

[2] Univ Penn, Dept Comp & Informat Sci, Philadelphia, PA USA

[3] Univ Penn, Annenberg Sch Commun, Philadelphia, PA USA

[4] Univ Penn, Operat Informat & Decis Dept, Philadelphia, PA USA

[5] MIT, Inst Data Syst & Soc, Cambridge, MA USA

[6] MIT, Dept Brain & Cognit Sci, Cambridge, MA USA

来源：

SCIENCE | 2024年 / 384卷 / 6699期

关键词：

FAKE NEWS; POLITICAL NEWS; FALSE NEWS; BEHAVIOR; EXPOSURE;

D O I：

10.1126/science.adk3451

中图分类号：

O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];

学科分类号：

07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;

摘要：

Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of US Facebook users (N approximate to 233 million). We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers. Although misinformation reduced predicted vaccination intentions significantly more than unflagged vaccine content when viewed, Facebook users' exposure to flagged content was limited. In contrast, unflagged stories highlighting rare deaths after vaccination were among Facebook's most-viewed stories. Our work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods.

引用

页数：9

共 106 条

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