Exploring the Influence of Comment Tone and Content in Response to Misinformation in Social Media News

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether tone (uncivil vs. civil) of online comments that correct subtle misinformation in a news story would be perceived differently than comments that reinforce the misinformation. A 2 (tone of comment: civil vs. uncivil) × (content of comment: reinforcing or correcting misinformation) online experiment (N = 416) demonstrated that participants perceived civil comments as more credible than uncivil comments. Furthermore, participants perceived comments as more credible if they corrected misinformation in a news story, rather than reinforced the misinformation. However, no significant interaction was found between the tone and content of comments, suggesting participants considered those factors separately when evaluating credibility of comments. Unlike previous findings, results of this study showed that the tone of comments did not influence participants’ perceptions of the credibility of the news story.

KEYWORDS:

• Incivility
• misinformation
• credibility
• comments
• news story
• social media

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We thank an anonymous reviewer for making this important point.

2 Originally, the experiment was designed a mixed-design with two story topic (health care and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA) as a within-subjects variable to test the robustness of effects across topics. However, the manipulation check showed that people were unable to differentiate between the comments that corrected or reinforced a factual error in the DACA story. So analysis of dependent variables in relation to the DACA story was removed.

3 See Medicaid eligibility requirements at: https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/index.html

4 The Facebook post generator was accessed at http://www.prankmenot.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Texas A&M International University [University Research Grant 2017–2018].