Community Fact-Checks Do Not Break Follower Loyalty

Major social media platforms increasingly adopt communitybased fact-checking to address misinformation on their platforms. While previous research has largely focused on its effect on engagement (e. g., reposts, likes), an understanding of how fact-checking affects a user's follower base is missing. In this study, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally assess whether users lose followers after their posts are corrected via community fact-checks. Based on timeseries data on follower counts for N = 3516 community factchecked posts from X, we find that community fact-checks do not lead to meaningful declines in the follower counts of users who post misleading content. This suggests that followers of spreaders of misleading posts tend to remain loyal and do not view community fact-checks as a sufficient reason to disengage. Our findings underscore the need for complementary interventions to more effectively disincentivize the production of misinformation on social media. On the one hand, sharing false information can cause reputational harm (Altay, Hacquin, and Mercier 2020) and being fact-checked may damage a user's perceived credibility. This may lead some followers (particularly those who value accuracy) to disengage. On the other hand, however, many users follow accounts based on social factors and ideological alignment (Aiello et al. 2012; Barberá 2015) rather than factual accuracy (Ashkinaze, Gilbert, and Budak 2024). This suggests that such audiences may be less responsive to public corrections, making it unlikely that being community fact-checked results in substantial follower loss. Existing empirical evidence outside of the context of communitybased fact-checking reflects this tension. Here, surveys suggest that users intend to unfollow peers who spread misinformation, particularly when it clashes with their political views (Kaiser, Vaccari, and Chadwick 2022). Yet observational research on expert-based fact-checking shows that misinformation spreaders are less likely to be unfollowed than non-spreaders (Ashkinaze, Gilbert, and Budak 2024). These mixed results highlight the absence of a consistent understanding of the user-level consequences of being publicly fact-checked -even outside the specific context of community-based fact-checking -and the need for causal evidence on how fact-checking affects follower dynamics. Research goal: In this study, we causally analyze whether authors of misinformation lose followers once their posts are corrected via community fact-checks. To this end, we compile a unique longitudinal dataset comprising N = 3516 posts that have been fact-checked via X's Community Notes platform between March and September 2024, i. e., within an observation period of seven months. For each post, we track daily follower counts over a 21-day window centered around the post's publication. To estimate causal effects, we leverage variation in the timing of community notes and apply a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) design. This enables us to isolate the causal effect of community notes on daily follower counts. Contribution: To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to causally analyze whether authors of misinformation lose followers after their their posts are corrected via community notes. Across a wide range of model specifications, outcome measures, and sub-samples, we find that community fact-checks do not lead to meaningful declines in follower counts. This indicates that such corrections may have limited influence on social ties and highlights the need for complementary strategies to more effectively disincentivize the production of misinformation on social media.