Are Corrective Social Media Replies Beneficial? Refutation Text Structure Grounded in Discourse Interactions

ABSTRACT Exposures to inaccurate information can result in reproductions of the falsehoods to answer questions and influence decisions. Reducing these effects is important for supporting accurate understandings and relevant to concerns about polluted social media environments. Refutation experiences have proven beneficial when offered as extended texts and short‐form fact checks. We assessed the utility of refutations instead conveyed as post‐reply sequences which can naturally occur in online discussions. In three experiments, participants read Tweets conveying potentially false information, also potentially followed by corrective replies. Participants were overall more likely to reproduce inaccuracies to answer questions after reading false Tweets than to spontaneously provide inaccurate responses after reading true Tweets. However, participants were less likely to reproduce inaccuracies and more likely to provide correct responses when false Tweets were followed by corrective replies embodying a refutation structure. Mechanisms underlying these benefits and applications for remediating inaccurate exposures online are discussed.