More than D&D think. Still not too surprising but good to see some data behind it. Fact-Checking Misinformation Can Work. But It Might Not Be Enough. Well, it turns out there is evidence that fact checks do work. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when confronted with a correction, a significant share of people do, in fact, update their beliefs.
How effective is it for braindead, brainwashed Trump supporters? First, there’s the source: Donald Trump. Trust him or doubt him, chances are you have an opinion of the president. And if you already trust him, who are you going to trust more in this particular disagreement? Trump? Or CNN and the Washington Post (the two sources Twitter listed in its fact check)? But given Trump’s notoriety, his misstatements may just be harder to combat. In one of Porter and Wood’s experiments, they took an op-ed by Trump and issued a correction on two versions of the piece: one (correctly) attributed to Trump and one attributed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The authors found that the fact-check of McConnell moved significantly more respondents toward the accurate position than did the fact check of Trump. Porter and Wood found that the share of conversative respondents who responded accurately when presented with a fact-checked version of Trump’s statement attributed to McConnell increased from 18 percent to 38 percent on a question about Medicare and Social Security (“The Democratic Party wants to slash budgets for Medicare and Social Security”) and from 19 percent to 33 percent on a statement about Venezuela (“The Democratic Party views Venezuela as a model for America’s economy”). When the original misstatement was attributed to Trump, however, the correction had no statistically significant effect.
