The fight against the spread of false news or fake news, as it is widely known has been a seemingly endless battle amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The government has been warning the public since the first wave of Covid-19 infections about the dangers of spreading fake news, and even regarded it as a punishable offence.

Now, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have found that a possible way of stopping the spread of false news is through the use of fact-checking labels.

The researchers conducted a study that involved two experiments, where a total of 2 683 participants were tasked with reading headlines taken from social media, of which 18 were true and 18 false.

In the treatment conditions, 'true' and 'false' tags appeared before, during, or after participants read each headline, the researchers explain in their paper. Participants could then rate the headlines for accuracy.

There was also a control group who did not see any information about whether the headlines were true or not.

A week after the first experiment, participants were given another opportunity to view the headlines and rate them, but this time the researchers excluded the fact-check information.

Findings of the study indicate that timing is important when correcting fake news: Going into the project, I had anticipated it would work best to give the correction beforehand, so that people already knew to disbelieve the false claim when they came into contact with it, said David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of the paper.

To my surprise, we actually found the opposite. Debunking the claim after they were exposed to it was the most effective.

The researchers noted that a possible reason why debunking worked better than prebunking is because allowing people to form their own impressions of news headlines, then providing 'true' or 'false' tags afterwards, might act as feedback.

Lead author and cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University, Nadia M. Brashier, went on to explain: Other research shows that feedback makes correct information 'stick.

Co-author, Adam Berinsky, who is a Professor of Political Science at MIT, explained that this study can be useful for creating tools that can be used on social media platforms in order to combat misinformation being spread online.

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How to combat the spread of fake news - News24