Fact-checking as a deterrent? A conceptual replication of the influence of fact-checking on the sharing of misinformation by political elites.

This article presents a conceptual replication and extension of a 2012 field experiment by Nyhan and Reifler, which originally found that the threat of fact-checking deterred U.S. state legislators from making false or misleading statements. The current study tested a similar intervention—emails highlighting a partnership between Hearst Communications, Inc. and FactCheck.org—aimed at increasing the salience of fact-checking among state legislators on Twitter during President Donald Trump's first impeachment trial in early 2020. Analyzing 3,845 legislators' tweets, the study found no statistically significant effect of the treatment on reducing misinformation, even when accounting for party affiliation, election status, or presence of a Hearst affiliate in the legislator's media market. These findings suggest that the deterrent effect of fact-checking on elite misinformation may be limited in the social media context and may have diminished over time due to changing political incentives and perceptions of fact-checking's credibility. The authors note the rarity of misinformation in the sample and the challenges of measuring it, emphasizing the need for further research on when and how fact-checking influences political elites' communication.