Security News > 2020 > March > How people deal with fake news or misinformation in their social media feeds

Researchers at the University of Washington wanted to know how people investigated potentially suspicious posts on their own feeds.

Previous research on how people interact with misinformation asked participants to examine content from a researcher-created account, not from someone they chose to follow.

The researchers recruited participants ages 18 to 74 from across the Seattle area, explaining that the team was interested in seeing how people use social media.

Then the team developed a Chrome extension that would randomly add fake posts or memes that had been debunked by the fact-checking website Snopes.com on top of real posts to make it temporarily appear they were being shared by people on participants' feeds.

"It's easy to say we need to build these social media platforms so that people don't get confused by fake posts. But I think there are opportunities for designers to incorporate people and their understanding of their own networks to design better social media platforms."

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