Intervention to Reduce Fake News Sharing on Social Media Targeted at High School Students

The proposed project involves implementing a “fake news prompt” asking whether prompting high school students whether or not they indeed want to share a news article will reduce sharing intentions of news articles that indeed are fake news. Such a prompt is proposed to work by stimulating System 2 thinking. While theoretically encouraging System 2 has been shown to reduce belief in fake news, this has never been tested in a practical manner. Such an intervention is proposed to be developed and implemented in a social media platform internal to a local high school in Indiana. Testing this intervention targeted at high school students is vital since students at this age are most susceptible to fake news.