Are Fact Checkers Effective in the Post Truth World? Assessing Impact of Fact Checkers Cross Medium and Platforms

Social media platforms help users share opinions and find new information but also spread rumors, which misinforms the public. These rumour threads often prompt users (called guardians) to respond with fact-checking articles to debunk or verify the rumour. We examine how general users’ and rumour starter respond to these fact-checking (FC) comments. This study explores these aspects by analysing users’ textual and non-textual engagements. These engagements are examined across three main factors: platforms (Twitter and Reddit), rumour topics, and the primary medium (text, image, video, and GIF) in the rumour post. We observed minimal differences across primary mediums by analyzing 147K news posts and FC comments with 20.7 million replies. Furthermore, we found that Reddit users engage with FC comments more than Twitter users in terms of likes and the rumour starter’s reply-back rates. We found that no general users engaged with the rumour post before and after the guardian intervention. The most significant differences in the emotive characteristics of replies were across topics, with rumour starters expressing more anger, disgust, and offensive language when discussing rumours about terrorism and racism. These emotions indicate the backfire effect. Our findings raise concerns about the effectiveness of fact-checking interventions in updating misinformed users.