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Paper Number

2423

Paper Type

Complete

Description

The rapid spread of misinformation on social media platforms has affected many facets of society, including presidential elections, public health, the global economy, and human well-being. Crowdsourced fact-checking is an effective method to mitigate the spread of misinformation on social media. A key factor that affects user behavior on crowdsourcing platforms is users' anonymity or identity disclosure. Within the crowdsourced-based fact-checking context, it is also unknown whether and how identity anonymity affects the users' fact-checking contribution performance. Leveraging a natural experiment policy happening on Twitter, we adopt regression discontinuity design to investigate two research questions: Whether and how the identity anonymity affects the crowdsourced fact-checking quantity and quality; how the characteristics of the crowdsourced users moderate the main impact. We find that the identity anonymization policy may not increase fact-checking users' contribution quantity, but the fact-checking quality does increase. Our research has both theoretical and practical implications.

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Dec 12th, 12:00 AM

How Does Anonymizing Crowdsourced Users' Identity Affect Fact-checking on Social Media Platforms? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

The rapid spread of misinformation on social media platforms has affected many facets of society, including presidential elections, public health, the global economy, and human well-being. Crowdsourced fact-checking is an effective method to mitigate the spread of misinformation on social media. A key factor that affects user behavior on crowdsourcing platforms is users' anonymity or identity disclosure. Within the crowdsourced-based fact-checking context, it is also unknown whether and how identity anonymity affects the users' fact-checking contribution performance. Leveraging a natural experiment policy happening on Twitter, we adopt regression discontinuity design to investigate two research questions: Whether and how the identity anonymity affects the crowdsourced fact-checking quantity and quality; how the characteristics of the crowdsourced users moderate the main impact. We find that the identity anonymization policy may not increase fact-checking users' contribution quantity, but the fact-checking quality does increase. Our research has both theoretical and practical implications.

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