PM Me the Truth? The Conditional Effectiveness of Fact-Checks Across Social Media Sites

Abstract

People use multiple social media daily. Some platforms feature public interactions like Facebook, others emphasize private communications such as Line. Although misinformation is rampant on all platforms, literature on fact-checks (FC) focuses primarily on public ones. This article provides an integrated psychological model and argues that FC is less effective on private platforms. People expect to encounter “unwelcome” FCs (incongruent with their beliefs) on public platforms, but selectively approach the “welcome” FC on private platforms. An experiment ( n = 601) and a national survey ( n = 1060) were implemented to test these hypotheses in the 2020 Taiwan Presidential Election. The experiment shows that respondents prefer FC on Line, which helps their party, but prefer FC on Facebook which disadvantages their party. The survey shows that consuming FC with more private platform usage has lower media literacy, while is the opposite on public platforms. Future work should focus on both FC and how it is consumed.