The same infographic kept appearing in my Twitter feed again and again around Thanksgiving. The graphic, originally shared by Donald Trump, showed a series of statistics about race and gun deaths in 2015, alongside an image of a dark-skinned man with a handgun.
Every single one of the statistics in the graphic was false.
But here’s the thing: The people I follow on Twitter weren’t endorsing the bogus statistics — quite the opposite. …
Their intention in fact-checking Trump was to counteract the effect that these false statistics had on people’s attitudes — but in sharing them, they may have done exactly the opposite. My research shows that even successfully corrected misinformation creates “belief echoes”: effects on attitudes that persist even when you know that a piece of information is false. CONT.
Emily Thorson (Boston College), Washington Post