Social reference cues can reduce misinformation sharing behaviour on social media

Misinformation on social media is a key challenge to effective and timely public health responses. Existing mitigation measures include flagging misinformation or providing links to correct information but have not yet targeted social processes. Here, we examine whether providing balanced social reference cues in addition to flagging misinformation leads to reductions in sharing behavior and improvement of overall sharing quality. In 3 field experiments (N=824, N=322, and N=278) on Twitter, we show that highlighting which content others within the personal network share and, more importantly, not share combined with misinformation flags significantly and meaningfully reduces the amount of misinformation shared and improves sharing quality (Study 1-3). We show that this improvement could be driven by change in injunctive social norms (Study 2) but not social identity (Study 3). Social reference cues, combined with misinformation flags, are feasible and scalable means to effectively curb sharing misinformation on social media.