Policy takeaway: Brief, scalable “tips to spot fake news” can often outperform reactive fact-checks. They’re easy to implement and foster critical thinking. Check out the full paper for all the details!

Some of the positive effects persist even two weeks later. Both interventions preserve trust in accurate posts, but media literacy builds broader, longer-lasting skills to spot misinformation.

We compare a brief media literacy training to fact-checking in a large-scale survey experiment. Key results: Fact-checking corrects specific falsehoods but doesn’t easily carry over to untagged content. Media literacy helps users detect a wider range of fake news.