OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Belief in misinformation causes confusion, reduces trust in authorities and encourages risky behaviours that can cause significant harm to health, as exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms have taken several policy measures to address this challenge; working with independent fact-checking companies to label inaccurate content, promoting verified information through prompts of fact-checked articles, or tailoring the algorithm to demote false posts in the newsfeed. But how effective are these measures? I aim to address this issue with a focus on Facebook and its policies to combat health-related misinformation in the context of India. My study has three key goals. First, I will evaluate the effectiveness of specific policies currently used by Facebook to debunk misinformation using an online experiment. Second, I aim to examine policy design tweaks informed by behavioural science to improve the effectiveness of these existing policies. Finally, I will examine how core aspects of users’ identities interact with the content of inaccurate posts to impact the efficacy of the policies, accounting for potential demand-side factors that contribute to the spread of misinformation.