How can we induce social media users to be discerning when sharing information during a pandemic? An experiment on Facebook Messenger with users from Kenya and Nigeria tested interventions designed to decrease intentions to share COVID-19 misinformation without decreasing intentions to share factual posts. The initial stage of the study incorporated: (i) a factorial design with 40 intervention combinations; and (ii) a contextual adaptive design, increasing the probability of assignment to treatments that worked better for previous subjects with similar characteristics. The second stage evaluated the best-performing treatments and a targeted treatment assignment policy estimated from the data. We precisely estimate null effects from warning flags and related article suggestions, tactics used by social media platforms. However, tips to identify misinformation and nudges to consider information's accuracy reduced misinformation sharing by 4.2% and 4.9% respectively. Such low-cost scalable interventions may improve the quality of information circulating online.

翻译：如何在大流行病期间促使社交媒体用户在分享信息时保持审慎？一项针对肯尼亚和尼日利亚用户的Facebook Messenger实验测试了多种干预措施，这些措施旨在减少传播COVID-19虚假信息的意图，同时不降低分享真实帖子的意图。研究的初始阶段包括：（i）包含40种干预组合的析因设计；以及（ii）情境自适应设计，该设计提高了将实验对象分配到对先前具有相似特征受试者效果更佳治疗组的概率。第二阶段评估了表现最佳的治疗方案，以及基于数据估算的目标治疗分配策略。我们精确估计了社交媒体平台采用的警示标签及关联文章建议等措施的零效应。然而，识别虚假信息的提示和促使受众考量信息准确性的助推措施，分别使虚假信息分享率降低了4.2%和4.9%。此类低成本、可扩展的干预措施或能提升在线信息传播质量。