“Come on people, this is clearly fake” - How Social Media Users React to Political Online Misinformation by Commenting

Political misinformation is thriving on social media and many individuals are unwillingly confronted with it. The comment section offers an opportunity for users to freely engage with online misinformation. However, little to no research has explored how people react to this potentially harmful content by commenting on it. To fill this void and to identify patterns reactions, we use a manual content analysis of user comments on three, as misinformation recognized, tweets involving UK politicians (N = 600). Our main findings show that the majority of the user comments disapproved the misinforming tweets and only a fraction expressed support. Furthermore, a vast amount of the comments contained uncivil language. These findings help us to shine a light on how individuals respond online misinformation and alert citizens, who are willing to call out misleading content.