Dartmouth students and faculty member publish in HKS Misinformation Review

With 16 current and former Dartmouth College undergraduates, Brendan Nyhan, a member of the Steering Committee of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) and the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government, recently published a study in the HKS Misinformation Review.  The study, in the Review's February 2025 issue, investigates the effectiveness of Twitter's state-affiliated media tags in reducing belief in misinformation. Conducted in May 2022 with 2,555 U.S. participants drawn from Amazon Mechanical Turk, the experiment at the heart of the article assesses whether media tags influenced individuals' perceptions of the accuracy of false information from state media outlets. The experiment's findings reveal that state-affiliated media tags did not significantly alter the perceived accuracy of false claims made in Tweets, suggesting that users may not have noticed these tags due to their subtle design. In contrast, Twitter's fact-check labels on posts made by state outlets were effective in decreasing belief in misinformation. The Nyhan article in the HKS Misinformation Review recommends that social media platforms enhance the visibility of state media tags to improve their efficacy in combating misinformation.

Among Professor Nyhan's co-authors were two research assistants whose work was sponsored by Dartmouth's Presidential Scholars program. One research assistant is Alice Cook '25 from Boston, MA.  Alice is majoring in Government and will be working at a Boston-based consulting firm when she graduates when she graduates. The second is Leyla Jacoby '25, who is majoring in QSS and writing an honors thesis under the supervision of Professor Nyhan. After graduation, Leyla plans to work as a commercial-side Deployment Strategist at Palantir.

In Spring 2025, Professor Nyhan will be teaching QSS 30.03 (cross-listed with GOVT 83.21) Experiments in Politics.

Read the Misinformation Reviews article here: State media tagging does not affect perceived tweet accuracy: Evidence from a U.S. Twitter experiment in 2022