Motivations for Correcting and Sharing Mis- and Disinformation

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Karolína Bieliková, whose interest is in the resilience to disinformation on social networking sites amongst active users. How can such resilience be improved? Karolína’s research takes an individual-centric view, exploring users’ strategies for building their resilience.

Users who provide corrections to mis- and disinformation might be crucial here – what motivates them, how do they choose their strategies for engaging with mis- and disinformation, and how can they and their actions be supported and empowered? The present study explored this in the Czech Republic, through 60 interviews with active users in the northern spring in 2021, 2022, and 2023; this therefore covers contexts from COVID-19 through the Ukraine war to the Czech presidential election. Participants were mostly young (under 30), male, and well-educated.

The study contrasted people who corrected false information with those who shared it. Correcters had a normative idea to do what is right, a strong emotional attachment to relevant topics, and a high opinion of their own critical abilities. These all fuelled their perception of a need to help others understand the world around them, but also produced a frustration that their efforts produced no notable impact. This leads to a change of strategies in their activities (from correcting information to blocking, reporting, trolling disinformation sources), or complete demotivation from engaging with the later disinformation topics.

Sharers of disinformation were motivated by the idea of helping people see ‘the truth’, and again had a high opinion of their own abilities to see ‘the truth’ when others couldn’t. Their motivation to provide ‘correct’ information was less likely to disappear, and their goal was often simply to get their preferred information out.

The correcters’ image of the people sharing disinformation was of less educated, older, unhappy people who lacked critical thinking skills; they were perceived of using similar arguments across different topics. There was also a sense that there was a group of true believers who actually subscribed to the disinformation, and others who simply lacked critical thinking skills and fell for any information they came across. Users also distinguished between completely false, bizarre, conspiracist disinformation on the one hand, and found such content not worth engaging with; and partially false information that was taken out of context, where they felt that corrections might be more successful.