Leveraging Library Trust to Combat Misinformation on Social Media

Abstract

One reason librarians are confident they have a role to play in fighting misinformation is the level of trust in libraries as institutions. Exactly how they might leverage that trust remains unclear and untested. Building on recent work in correcting health misperceptions on social media, this study tests whether libraries can leverage trust to combat misinformation online. Using a misperception about the influenza vaccine as a test case, an experiment (n = 625) was conducted in fall 2018 using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that the misperception can be reduced, but not by library institutions. An unsuccessful follow-up (n = 600) suggests that the effectiveness of the correction is season dependent and opens the possibility that libraries may yet play a role, but not necessarily because they are trusted. Future library proposals for combating misinformation need to be developed and tested within a broader contemporary misinformation research program.