Center for Effective Global Action

This study examines how controlling misinformation on a social media platform in Pakistan affects users’ exposure to both accurate and false information. It combines an intervention to disseminate official information about the COVID-19 pandemic across the platform with a randomized experiment that measures the impact of fully controlling access to pandemic-related misinformation. The treatments rely on a higher-intensity, ex ante approach to moderating misinformation on the platform relative to the control, which relies on a typical ex post approach to moderation. Fully controlling misinformation, as in the treatments, reduces the number of daily users by 19%, indicating a distaste for moderation. Furthermore, the treatments reduce exposure to official information by 29% more than they reduce exposure to misinformation. A conceptual framework posits that these findings can be explained by the fact that, in this setting, official information is more trusted, and thus is more widely disseminated, relative to misinformation.