Promoting engagement with social fact-checks online: Investigating the roles of social connection and shared partisanship

Social corrections – where users correct each other – can help rectify inaccurate beliefs. However,social corrections are often ignored. Here we ask under what conditions social corrections promoteengagement from corrected users, allowing for greater insight into how users respond to debunkingmessages (even if such responses are negative). Prior work suggests two key factors may helppromote engagement with corrections – partisan alignment between users, and social connectionsbetween users. We investigate these factors here. First, we conducted a field experiment on Twitter(X) using human-looking bots to examine how shared partisanship and prior social connectionaffect correction engagement. We randomized whether our accounts identified as Democrat orRepublican, and whether they followed Twitter users and liked three of their tweets beforecorrecting them (creating a minimal social connection). We found that shared partisanship had nosignificant effect in the baseline (no social connection) condition. Interestingly, social connectionincreased engagement with corrections from co-partisans. Effects in the social counter-partisancondition were ambiguous. Follow-up survey experiments largely replicated these results andfound evidence for a generalized norm of responding, wherein people feel more obligated torespond to people who follow them – even outside the context of misinformation correction. Ourfindings have important implications for increasing engagement with social corrections online.