Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reposting has been identified as a primary conduit for misinformation spread. We hypothesize that reposting is especially conducive to misinformation because it allows the sender to spread false content while incurring lower reputational costs compared to posting. Experiment 1 (N=293) tests this hypothesis by measuring how reposting falsehoods affects reputation. It compares the effects of posting, reposting, and verbally reporting the same false content. Sources that directly posted false content were judged significantly less reliable than sources that reposted or reported the same false content. Experiment 2 (N=256) tests robustness by replicating findings across platforms (Facebook and Twitter) and source types (private individuals rather than institutions). Original posters again suffered greater reputational damage than reposters. These results strongly support the idea that reposting comes with reduced accountability, suggesting that its reduced reputational costs might play an important role in facilitating misinformation spread on social media.