No “Me” in Misinformation: The Role of Social Groups in the Spread of, and Fight Against, Fake News

Interpersonal and group chats, such as WhatsApp, have become channels for information exchange. Unfortunately, they have also become channels for fake news. But if fake news spreads through chat groups, it begets the question if corrections also be effectively disseminated in the same way. Guided by the frameworks of social identity theory and social presence theory, this study examined the impact of source familiarity (familiar versus unfamiliar) and mode of delivery (interpersonal chat versus group chat) on the perceived credibility of a correction message to debunk misinformation sent on WhatsApp. Through a five-day-long experiment involving 114 student participants in Singapore, this study found no main effect of either source familiarity or mode of delivery on the perceived credibility of the correction message. However, the study found a significant interaction effect—when the correction was sent to a chat group, members rated it as more credible when it was sent by a familiar source than when it was sent by a source they had never met.