Evaluating Policy Interventions to Prevent the Spread of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental evidence from the Global South

Belief in misinformation causes confusion, reduces trust in authorities and encourages risky behaviours that can cause significant harm to health, as exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms have taken several policy measures to address this challenge; working with independent fact-checking companies to label inaccurate content, promoting verified information through prompts of fact-checked articles, or tailoring the algorithm to demote false posts in the newsfeed. But how effective are these measures? I aim to address this issue with a focus on Facebook and its policies to combat health-related misinformation in the context of the Global South. My study has three key goals. First, I will evaluate the effectiveness of specific policies currently used by Facebook to debunk misinformation using an online experiment. Second, I aim to examine design tweaks informed by behavioural science to improve the effectiveness of these existing policies. Finally, I will examine how core aspects of users’ identities and prior beliefs interact with the content of inaccurate posts to impact the efficacy of the labelling policies, accounting for potential demand-side factors that contribute to the spread of misinformation. I will collect data in two waves, spaced two - three weeks apart to measure if the effects endure over a period of time.