Countering misinformation on social media through educational interventions: Evidence from a randomized experiment in Pakistan

Fake news is a growing problem in developing countries with potentially far-reaching consequences. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of two educational interventions to counter misinformation among low digital literacy populations in urban Pakistan using a randomized experiment. We find no evidence that video-based general educational messages about misinformation have any statistically significant impact on the ability to correctly identify news items as true or fake. However, when such messages are augmented with personalized feedback based on individuals’ past engagement with fake news, we find an improvement of 3.3 percentage points or 4.5 percent in correctly identifying news (true or fake) relative to the control group. Our results suggest that educational interventions can enable information discernment but their effectiveness depends on how well their features and delivery are customized for the population of interest. •Misinformation is a growing concern in developing countries.•We evaluate whether educational interventions improve discernment of news.•We find no effect of video-based general educational messages.•When a video message is combined with personalized feedback, accuracy rate improves.