Labels on articles that indicate the reliability of the news source

By making users aware of the credibility of a news source, labels will make users less susceptible and less willing to share misinformation.

Three studies testing a variety of news source labels provide promising, though limited, evidence that indicating the reliability of an article’s source can make individuals more discerning of truth and less willing to share misinformation. 

In an online field experiment, Aslett et. al (2022) tested how effective news source labels are in improving news consumption quality and in reducing misperceptions. Study participants were randomly assigned to receive a nudge to download and use the NewsGuard chrome extension which automatically labels news content across search engine results pages and social media interfaces. After 3-4 weeks the researchers compared how participants who were nudged to use NewsGuard differed from participants in a control group, who were not encouraged to download the extension, looking at attitudes about media, misperception beliefs, and consumption of low quality sources. Overall, they find that NewsGuard labels did not meaningfully decrease user’s engagement with news sources that are unreliable, or their misperception beliefs about two popular news topics (COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter). However, NewsGuard did slightly decrease the consumption of low-quality news among participants who were consuming low quality news prior to downloading the extension. 

Two separate survey experiments were interested in whether source labels could reduce participants’ intentions to share misinformation on social media, each using different approaches to label source credibility. Arnold et al. (2021) looked at labels that indicated whether an article was from a foreign source. Participants were shown social media posts with misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and randomly assigned to either see a source alert (either signaling a foreign government, or specifically Russian government source) or no source alert. Those assigned to receive a source alert reported lower intention to share, compared to the control group. They were also less likely to believe the false stories. Celadin et al. (2023) used a star-based system to indicate source trustworthiness. Participants were either assigned to see ratings, some being told they were made by “lay-people” and some by “fact-checkers”, or a control condition with no ratings. Participants exposed to star-based trustworthiness ratings were less likely to say they would share false headlines compared to participants who did not see ratings. 

Overall, although we see minimal effects in the one field experiment (Aslett et al., 2022), the two survey experiments above suggest that adding a source credibility signal to news stories may reduce how much social media users re-share misinformation. Yet more evidence is needed, ideally a field experiment that measures re-shares, in order to be confident.

News credibility ratings can be an effective way to reduce the spread and impact of misinformation, but labeling the veracity of individual news articles is hard to scale (see Labeling Misleading Content and Crowdsourcing Contextual Information). Labeling the reliability of sources can be a more efficient, though less precise, way for platforms and third party tools to alert users to potential misinformation.