Countering State-Controlled Media Propaganda Through Labeling: Evidence from Facebook

Manipulative content and propaganda are an information quality concern on social media. Although attention has been turned toward mis- and disinformation, government-controlled social media pages have been able to quietly share information to encourage users toward beliefs without sharing content that may be clearly labeled as false. To combat the effect of quiet foreign government persuasion attempts, Facebook debuted a “state-controlled media” label in June 2020 to alert users that a post originates from a page associated with selected governments, including Russia and China. We conduct two online randomized experiments to better understand the causal impact of these labels on intentions to engage with content on Facebook. We augment our experiments by analyzing field data from Facebook before and after these labels were implemented and studying actual engagement. We find that labels are effective in reducing engagement on social media if users notice the labels and if the label is associated with a country that is perceived negatively. More users notice the label if trained. The combination of these studies suggests that these labels can successfully reduce engagement with posts by Russian and Chinese state-controlled pages but may even increase engagement for other countries perceived positively like Canada.

History: Anandasivam Gopal, Senior Editor; Idris Adjerid, Associate Editor.

Funding: This work was supported by the McCombs Research Excellence Fund.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0305.