Can We Re-design Social Media to Persuade People to Challenge Misinformation? An Exploratory Study

Persuasive design techniques have often been presented where the desired behaviour is primarily within personal boundaries, e.g., one's own health and learning. Limited research has been conducted on behaviours that require exposure to others, including correcting, confronting mistakes and wrongdoing. Challenging misinformation in others’ posts online is an example of such social behaviour. This study draws on the main persuasive system design models and principles to create interfaces on social media to motivate users to challenge misinformation. We conducted a questionnaire (with 250 participants from the UK) to test the influence of these interfaces on willingness to challenge and how age, gender, personality traits, perspective-taking and empathy affected their perception of the persuasiveness of the interfaces. Our proposed interfaces exemplify seven persuasive strategies: reduction, suggestion, self-monitoring, recognition, normative influence, tunneling and liking. Most participants thought existing social media did not provide enough techniques and tools to challenge misinformation. While predefined question stickers (suggestion), private commenting (reduction), and thinking face reactions (liking) were seen as effective ways to motivate users to challenge misinformation, sentence openers (tunneling) was seen as the least influential. Increasing age and perspective taking were associated with increased likelihood of perceived persuasiveness and increasing openness to experience was associated with a reduction in the likelihood of perceived persuasiveness for “predefined question stickers”. Increasing openness to experience was associated with increased likelihood of perceived persuasiveness for “thinking face reaction”, while increasing age was associated with a reduction in the likelihood of perceived persuasiveness for “private commenting”.