Scrolling Through Fake News: The Effect of Presentation Order on Misinformation Retention

Sharing information in real time leaves little room for double-checking. This leads to an abundance of low-quality information that might later need to be corrected and provides a foundation on which false beliefs can arise. Today, the general population often consults digital media platforms for news content. Because of the sheer amount of news articles and the various ways digital media platforms organize material, readers may encounter news articles with faulty content and their subsequent corrections in various orders. They might read the misinformation before the corrected version or vice versa. We conducted two studies in which participants were presented with two reports of a news event: one report that included a piece of misinformation and one report in which that misinformation was retracted. The order in which the two reports were encountered was manipulated. In Study 1, the retraction contained an explicit reminder of the misinformation; in Study 2, it did not. Neither Study 1 nor Study 2 found an effect of presentation order on misinformation reliance. These findings run counter to predictions by those accounts of the continued influence effect that suggest a better encoding of retractions and subsequent lesser reliance on misinformation when retractions are encountered first.