Fighting lies with facts or humor: Comparing the effectiveness of satirical and regular fact-checks in response to misinformation and disinformation

Figures & data

Figure 1. Visual depiction of experimental design and order of stimuli.

Figure 2. The visualized interaction effect on issue agreement (continuous line) and its 95% confidence interval (CI; dotted lines) of being exposed to fact-checking information (regular and satirical combined) relative to exposure to no fact-checking information for different levels of prior attitudinal congruence with the fact-check (x-axis: low to high congruence).

Note: When both sides of the CI are below the y-axis (effect on issue-agreement) at one point on the x-axis (attitudinal congruence), this indicates statistical significance of the effect on issue-agreement of exposure to fact-checking information at that particular level of attitudinal congruence. Datapoints are obtained with the Process-macro 4.0 (Hayes, 2022).

Figure 3. Mean polarization scores for the presence and absence of a fact-check message at different levels of attitudinal congruence with the fact-check (+1 SD above and –1 SD below the mean of attitudinal congruence) – specified for unpolarized misinformation and polarized disinformation conditions.

Table 1. Overview of findings.

		Dependent variable
Independent variable	Issue-agreement	Perceived accuracy	Affective polarization
Control vs. Fact-check:
H1: Fact-check exposure	Less agreement with false information	Lower perceived accuracy of false information	More polarization (but only significant for satirical fact-check)
H3: Fact-check × Attitudinal congruence	Fact-checking more impact full for people agreeing with the fact-check	n.s.	Fact-checking causes more polarization among people who agree with the fact-check (but p = .054)
H5: Fact-check × Mis- vs. Disinfo × Attitudinal congruence	n.s.	n.s.	Fact-check exposure generally leads to more polarization, but not for disinformation among people with an incongruent attitude regarding the fact-check.
Regular fact-check vs. Satirical fact-check:
H2: Regular vs. Satirical fact-check	n.s.	n.s.	n.s.
H4: Regular vs. satirical × Attitudinal congruence	Negative effect of satirical fact-check occurs across the board; Regular fact-checking only influenced people with congruent attitude	n.s.	The satirical fact-checker increased polarization for all people; Regular fact-checker increased polarization only among participants with a congruent attitude.
H6: Regular vs. Satirical × Mis- vs. Disinfo × Attitudinal congruence	n.s.	n.s.	n.s.

Note: Description of findings is only included for significant relationships (p < .050). Non-significant difference are denoted with n.s., which are therefore not interpreted in terms of effect patterns.

Hayes, A. F. (2022). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.

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