Much has been spoken about the different ways misinformation can be correct online such as encouraging experts to engage in corrections and increasing News Literacy (NL) efforts. Through this study we combine these methods to study whether NL messages enhance the effectiveness of expert correction. In the first study, the participants see a total of six tweets on the feed among which two are manipulated: first is the news literacy effort encouraging you/ the citizen to be more aware consumers of media and the second is an expert organization offering correction to a piece of misinformation. We found that while expert correction was effective in reducing (but not eliminating) misperceptions, the news literacy message did not have any significant impact. To be more sure, we did a second study where the news literacy was stronger and tested it on an actual piece of viral misinformation– the NL message again did not make a significant difference. We also observed that the correction was more effective in reducing misperceptions in those who had strongly believed in the misinformation as opposed to those who were neutral or only somewhat believed in it.
Through this study, we found that making effective New Literacy efforts on social media needs to go beyond simple messaging, they cannot simply be translated. More effective would Perhaps be more attention grabbing messages like GIFs or graphics which could break through the clutter on social media feeds. As both studies showed, offering expert corrections to misinformation continues to be an effective strategy and we encourage research into other effective news literacy strategies.