Correction by distraction: how high-tempo music enhances medical experts’ debunking TikTok videos

Abstract The spread of multimodal coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) misinformation on social media poses considerable public health risks. Yet limited research has addressed the efficacy of citizen-contributed, multimodal debunking messages, especially the roles of audiovisual structural features. In a between-subject online experiment, we assessed the impacts of misleading TikTok videos promoting the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility and compared the effectiveness of debunking videos from medical experts vs. laypeople. We independently varied the presence of background music. Results showed that while misleading TikTok videos increased misperceptions, most debunking videos effectively countered such misinformation. Notably, compared with laypeople’s testimonial corrections, expert didactic videos benefited more from incorporating high-tempo background music, primarily through the suppression of counterarguing rather than through enhanced encoding. These findings underscore the importance to consider audiovisual structural features, such as background music, as well as the cognitive pathway through distracted counterarguing, in future research on multimodal misinformation and correction. Lay Summary The spread of multimodal coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) misinformation on social media poses public health risks. However, we do not know much about whether citizen-contributed debunking video messages can help correct health-related misinformation, nor the roles of specific message features such as background music. To answer these questions, we conducted an online experiment where participants viewed misleading TikTok videos about COVID-19 vaccines causing infertility and then watched correction videos from experts or regular users. We also varied whether these debunking videos included high- vs. low-tempo background music. We found that most correction videos effectively corrected the false information. Notably, expert videos with fast-paced music were particularly successful in reducing counterarguments that criticized the correction messages, which in turn helped improve such correction messages’ persuasiveness. Our study underscores the importance of well-crafted multimedia corrections, including the role of background music, in combatting false information on platforms like TikTok.