When forewarned is not forearmed: The paradoxical effect of single warnings attached to repeated fake news
The fight against misinformation on social media and the internet in general has gained tremendous attention in the recent years. One way of combatting this has been to attach warnings tags about verified content. In this paper, we report two studies that examine the potential effects of a single warning tag in a context where the gist of a False claim is often repeated without the tag, which, given the reality of the way that information is transmitted, can be said to be an ecologically realistic model. Study 1 showed that the placement of the tag makes no difference, while a simple tag produces higher levels of belief than a tag with explanatory details. Remarkably, the simple tag produces a large increase in belief in the False claim. Study 2 showed that enhancing the distinctive character of a tag by adding irrelevant information to it produces a relative increase in believability equivalent to that obtained by making the claim graphically more distinctive. However, repeating a simple tag more often reduces this effect. These results indicate that the effects of warning tags are a combination of adding to the distinctiveness of the memory trace of the False claim (which makes this more believable by increasing fluency) and the semantic content of the tag (which reduces belief).