Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit
Open accessAbstract
Contested factual claims shared online are of increasing interest to scholars and the public. Characterizing temporal patterns of sharing and engagement with such information, as well as the effect of sharing associated fact-checks, can help us understand the online political news environment more fully. Here, we investigate differential engagement with fact-checked posts shared online via Reddit from 2016 to 2018. The data comprise ∼29,000 conversations, ∼849,000 users, and ∼9.8 million comments. We classified the veracity of the posts being discussed as true, mixed, or false using three fact-checking organizations. Regardless of veracity, fact-checked posts had larger and longer lasting conversations than claims that were not fact-checked. Among those that were fact-checked, posts rated as false were discussed less and for shorter periods of time than claims that were rated as true. We also observe that fact-checks of posts rated as false tend to happen more quickly than fact-checks of posts rated as true. Finally, we observe that thread deletion and removal are systematically related to the presence of a fact-check and the veracity of the fact-check, but when deletion and removal are combined the differences are minimal. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
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True news is more likely to generate engagement than false news on Reddit.
“Additionally, true news is more likely to generate engagement than false news on Reddit (Bond & Garrett 2023).”
From Social Media and Morality. (2024) · cites this paper as Bond & Garrett 2023
The Discussion reports lower engagement for fact-checked Reddit posts whose information was false than for those whose information was true. The claim omits that the study examined posts eliciting fact-checking comments, so it extends the finding to Reddit news generally. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Cites
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Van Bavel, J. J., Robertson, C. E., del Rosario, K., Rasmussen, J., & Rathje, S. (2024) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-022123-110258 · Cited by 121 · see citing works
People think that social media platforms do (but should not) amplify divisive content
Rathje, S., Robertson, C., Brady, W. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/17456916231190392 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bond, R. M., & Garrett, R. K.
- Affiliations
- The Ohio State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bond, Robert M
- Venue
- PNAS Nexus
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2023-01-27
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- pgad018-pgad018
- ISSN
- 2752-6542 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10011804
- OpenAlex
- W4318333070
- Cited by
- 30
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 13.32
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PNAS Nexus (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Keywords
- fact-checking, Reddit, online engagement, misinformation, factual claims, political news, online discourse, content removal
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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