论文标题
其他有多少人分享了这个？实验研究社会线索对社交媒体参与，错误信息和不可预测性的影响
How many others have shared this? Experimentally investigating the effects of social cues on engagement, misinformation, and unpredictability on social media
论文作者
论文摘要
与传统媒体不同，社交媒体通常提供量化的指标，以了解每种内容有多少用户。有人认为，这些提示的存在促进了错误信息的传播。在这里，我们研究了社会线索对用户参与社交媒体帖子的因果影响。我们在定制的新闻源界面上对N = 628个美国人进行了实验，在该界面中，我们系统地改变了社交线索的存在和力量。我们发现，当显示提示时，表明更多其他人参与了帖子时，用户更有可能共享和喜欢该帖子。此外，相对于没有社会线索的控制，社会提示的存在增加了相对于虚假新闻的真实分享。社交线索的存在也使得更加难以准确预测任何给定职位的流行程度。我们的结果共同表明，在某些情况下，社交线索实际上可以促进真相的识别并减少误解的共享，而不是分散用户或使他们分享低质量的新闻。我们的工作表明，社交线索在塑造用户在社交媒体上的关注和参与度中起着重要作用，平台应了解不同提示的效果，然后再对显示的线索进行更改以及如何显示。
Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we investigate the causal effect of social cues on users' engagement with social media posts. We conducted an experiment with N=628 Americans on a custom-built newsfeed interface where we systematically varied the presence and strength of social cues. We find that when cues are shown, indicating that a larger number of others have engaged with a post, users were more likely to share and like that post. Furthermore, relative to a control without social cues, the presence of social cues increased the sharing of true relative to false news. The presence of social cues also makes it more difficult to precisely predict how popular any given post would be. Together, our results suggest that -- instead of distracting users or causing them to share low-quality news -- social cues may, in certain circumstances, actually boost truth discernment and reduce the sharing of misinformation. Our work suggests that social cues play important roles in shaping users' attention and engagement on social media, and platforms should understand the effects of different cues before making changes to what cues are displayed and how.
