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：如何在大流行期间引导社交媒体用户在分享信息时保持辨别力？一项针对肯尼亚和尼日利亚用户的Facebook Messenger实验测试了旨在减少分享COVID-19错误信息意图、同时不减少分享事实性帖子意图的干预措施。研究初始阶段包括：（i）包含40种干预组合的析因设计；以及（ii）情境自适应设计，即增加分配给对先前具有相似特征的受试者效果更佳的治疗方案的概率。第二阶段评估了表现最佳的治疗方案以及根据数据估计出的针对性治疗分配策略。我们精确估计了社交媒体平台采用的警告标志和相关文章建议策略的零效应。然而，识别错误信息的小贴士以及促使人们考虑信息准确性的提示分别将错误信息分享率降低了4.2%和4.9%。此类低成本可扩展干预措施有望提升在线传播信息的质量。