The Influence of Content Modality on Perceptions of Online Misinformation

Social media has become a primary information source, with platforms evolving from text-based to multi-modal environments that include images and videos. While richer media modalities enhance user engagement, they also increase the spread and perceived credibility of misinformation. Most interventions to counter misinformation on social media are text-based, which may lack the persuasive power of richer modalities. This study explores whether the effectiveness of misinformation correction varies by modality, and if certain modalities of misinformation are better countered by a specific correction modality. We conducted a survey-based experiment where participants rated the credibility of misinformation tweets before and after exposure to corrections, across all combinations of text, images and video modalities. Our findings suggest that corrections are most effective when their modality richness matches that of the original misinformation. We discuss factors affecting the perceived credibility of corrections and offer strategies to optimise misinformation correction.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.