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A simple social gesture can make people more likely to engage with online fact-checks

In today's polarized online landscape, fact-checking has become a vital tool for countering misinformation. But for fact-checks to make a difference, people have to actually pay attention to them.

A widely held assumption is that corrections are more effective when they come from someone who shares your political views. But is shared ideology really what makes people listen?

A new study titled "Promoting engagement with social fact-checks online: Investigating the roles of social connection and shared partisanship," carried out in partnership with researchers at MIT Sloan School of Management and in PLOS ONE, suggests otherwise.

The researchers found that social ties matter. People are more likely to engage with corrections when there is even a minimal social connection between them and the person delivering the correction—such as a follow or a like on social media—regardless of political alignment.

To understand the dynamics behind this, the study combined a large-scale field experiment on Twitter (now X) with carefully controlled survey experiments. This mixed approach allowed the researchers to study not only how people behave in real-world conditions (ecological validity), but also the underlying psychological mechanisms in a controlled setting.

The takeaway? A small gesture of social contact can make a significant difference.

People were significantly more likely to reply to or otherwise engage with a correction when the corrector had interacted with them beforehand. Surprisingly, the researchers found no evidence that shared political partisanship increased engagement on its own.

What this suggests is that social norms—like the feeling that we should respond to someone who's shown interest in us—may be more powerful than ideological alignment when it comes to prompting engagement online.

For those trying to counter misinformation, this points to a practical strategy: Build a bit of rapport first, even in small ways.

Of course, it's not all good news.

Among highly partisan users, those minimal connections actually decreased engagement if the correction came from someone on the other side of the political spectrum. This points to a challenge in reaching the most polarized users and suggests that signals of political identity can sometimes do more harm than good.

Still, the research offers a new way to think about how to design interventions—both human and automated—that aim to correct misinformation.

If we want people to respond to corrections, we need to consider not just the message, but the relationship (however slight) between the messenger and the recipient. In other words: it's not just what you say, or even who says it—but whether the listener feels any kind of social tie.