Mass Communication Commons^™

Pm Me The Truth? The Conditional Effectiveness Of Fact-Checks Across Social Media Sites, Austin Horng-En Wang

Political Science Faculty Research

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 …