Reviewing Interventions to Address Misinformation: The Need to Expand Our Vision Beyond an Individualistic Focus

Abstract

Prior work has identified a variety of factors that drive the way people identify and respond to misinformation. Such factors include confirmation bias, perceived credibility of the information source, individual media literacy, social norms, and others. This paper reviews the interventions designed to address misinformation and examines how various underlying mechanisms of response to misinformation are operationalized and implemented in the reviewed interventions. Key findings show that most prior work to address misinformation heavily focuses on individual pieces of misinformation and the actions individuals take in response to those individual pieces. These individualistic approaches, we argue, overlook the other drivers of responses to misinformation, such as individuals' prior beliefs and the social contexts in which misinformation is encountered. Additionally, the analysis shows that an individualistic focus on misinformation draws attention away from the systemic nature and consequences of misinformation. This paper argues that to overcome the limitation of individualistic approaches to addressing misinformation, future interventions need to expand their scope beyond individualistic approaches. As one way to do so, it discusses leveraging the impacts of community factors that impact the spread and impacts of misinformation. The paper concludes by using social norms as an example to illustrate how a focus on community factors might work in practice.