Comparing Audience Appreciation to Fact-Checking Across Political Communities on Reddit

Abstract

As a countermeasure to disinformation, many fact-checking websites, such as Snopes.com, provide valuable resources to verify news stories or claims. In this paper, we study how such fact-checking resources are used in online political discussions on Reddit, and how audiences or readers respond to their use in the context of the 2016 US Presidential Election. We first characterize the role of fact-checking resources by developing a typology for labeling instances in which they are employed in three political subreddits, r/politics, r/The-Donald and r/hillaryclinton. We find that fact-checking, when used as a correction to false information, is more prevalent on r/politics than on r/The-Donald or r/hillaryclinton. Next, we quantify audience responses to fact-checking by using comment score as a measure of popularity and find that the correction of facts is also more appreciated in r/politics than the other subreddits. Finally, we estimate the impact of corrections, and other uses of fact-checks, on the sustainability of a conversational thread and find that presence of corrections in r/politics appear to be correlated with short conversations. Overall, these findings indicate that the use of fact-checking resources within r/politics is distinct from more partisan subreddits.