More pressing matters: Can priority reorientation beat online misinformation?

When can misinformation fail to become viral, and what does this tell us about the things we can do to defeat it? Today, misinformation on social media is a serious problem. Much has been written about misinformation achieving virality, but few explore situations where it fails to become viral to learn from what can defeat it. Here, we argue that the implementation of intrusive policies—measures that temporarily restrict certain rights and freedoms—may catalyze shifts in public priorities, potentially countering the spread of misinformation unrelated to emergent concerns. To test our argument, we design a lexicon that helps us collect 51,970 posts spreading misinformation about refugees on Facebook across 133 countries from January 2020 to April 2021. We combine these posts with daily measures for the stringency of government policies aimed at curbing the coronavirus pandemic for this same timeframe. Results show that implementing intrusive policies against the pandemic help reorient priorities worldwide and yield a net decrease in the virality of misinformation about refugees. These results have important implications for policymakers, engineers of social media algorithms, and IGO/NGO workers who work on fact-checking and fighting misinformation.