Meaningful Context, a Red Flag, or Both? Preferences for Enhanced Misinformation Warnings Among US Twitter Users

Warning users about misinformation on social media is not a simple usability task. Soft moderation has to balance between debunking falsehoods and avoiding moderation bias while preserving the social media consumption flow. Platforms thus employ minimally distinguishable warning tags with generic text under a suspected misinformation content. This approach, evidence suggests, made users either simply ignore the warning tags or believe the misinformation content more, not less. To curtail this unfavorable outcome, we developed enhancements to the misinformation warnings where users are advised on the context of the information hazard and exposed to standard warning iconography. The purpose of these enhancements is to make the warning tags easily distinguishable while conveying comprehensible, hard-to-ignore warning text. We ran an A/B evaluation with the Twitter’s original warning tags in a 337 participant usability study with users from the United States. The majority of the participants preferred the enhancements as a nudge toward recognizing and avoiding misinformation. The enhanced warning tags were most favored by the politically left-leaning and to a lesser degree moderate participants, but they also appealed to roughly a third of the right-leaning participants.