Data for: Measuring receptivity to misinformation at scale on a social media platform

General Information

This contains the data for the publication:

Tokita CK, Aslett K, Godel WP, Sanderson Z, Tucker JA, Nagler J, Persily N, Bonneau RA. (2024). Measuring receptivity to misinformation at scale on a social media platform. PNAS Nexus.

Please see the above peer-reviewed article that resulted from this data for more details.

Raw and original data are located in the `data/` directory, while data that is generated from intermediate analysis is found in the `data_derived/` directory.

Please see the directory in the Github repository https://github.com/christokita/news-belief-at-scale for the code that analyzes this data and generates derived data. The code expects both the `data/` and `data_derived/` folders to reside within the same directory.

We also included a README with a description of each directory and subdirectory of the data.

Abstract (for main paper)

Measuring the impact of online misinformation is challenging. Traditional measures, such as user views or shares on social media, are incomplete because not everyone who is exposed to misinformation is equally likely to believe it. To address this issue, we developed a method that combines survey data with observational Twitter data to probabilistically estimate the number of users both exposed to and likely to believe a specific news story. As a proof of concept, we applied this method to 139 viral news articles and find that although false news reaches an audience with diverse political views, users who are both exposed and receptive to believing false news tend to have more extreme ideologies. These receptive users are also more likely to encounter misinformation earlier than those who are unlikely to believe it. This mismatch between overall user exposure and receptive user exposure underscores the limitation of relying solely on exposure or interaction data to measure the impact of misinformation, as well as the challenge of implementing effective interventions. To demonstrate how our approach can address this challenge, we then conducted data-driven simulations of common interventions used by social media platforms. We find that these interventions are only modestly effective at reducing exposure among users likely to believe misinformation, and their effectiveness quickly diminishes unless implemented soon after misinformation's initial spread. Our paper provides a more precise estimate of misinformation's impact by focusing on the exposure of users likely to believe it, offering insights for effective mitigation strategies on social media.

Significance Statement (for main paper)

As social media platforms grapple with misinformation, our study offers a new approach to measure its spread and impact. By combining survey data with social media data, we estimate not only the number of users exposed to false (and true) news but also the number of users likely to believe these news stories. We find that the impact of misinformation is not evenly distributed, with ideologically extreme users being more likely to see and believe false content, often encountering it before others. Our simulations suggest that current interventions may have limited effectiveness in reducing the exposure of receptive users. These findings highlight the need to consider individual user receptiveness when measuring misinformation's impact and developing policies to combat its spread.