Effect of an online accuracy nudge intervention and news-framing on social media user's likelihood of sharing vaccine-related fake news online

The recent development of COVID-19 vaccines has resulted in an abundance of vaccine-related news being shared on social media, a large proportion of which being misinformation. This research aims to conceptually replicate recent findings regarding the effectiveness of an online accuracy-nudge intervention on likelihood of sharing fake news. The proposed study is quantitative in methodology, with a 2 [condition (control, experimental)] x 2 [framing (positive, negative)] mixed experimental design. Participants will complete an online survey measuring the likelihood of sharing vaccine-related true and fake news headlines. Participants in the experimental condition will rate the accuracy of a politically neutral news headline unrelated to vaccines. Participants in the control condition will not complete this task. All participants will then report their likelihood of sharing both positively-framed and negatively-framed vaccine-related news headlines in order to assess the potential effect of framing on sharing behaviours. For the main effect of the accuracy nudge factor it is hypothesised that participants in the experimental condition will have greater news-sharing discernment (i.e. the difference in likelihood for each individual to share true vs fake news) as they are prompted to reflect on accuracy before sharing. For the main effect of the framing factor it is hypothesised that participants will have greater news-sharing discernment for the negative news than the positive news. It is hypothesised that the accuracy nudge intervention will soften the impact of the framing effect, with greater difference between sharing discernment for positive news vs negative news among participants in the control condition than in the experimental condition. It is hoped that findings of this study can assist with the creation of online interventions to reduce levels of vaccine-related fake news sharing.