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Social media can in fact be made better: Research shows it is possible to reward users for sharing accurate information instead of misinformation

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Social media can in fact be made better: Research shows it is possible to reward users for sharing accurate information instead of misinformation

We feel rewarded by reactions to information we share, and that can lead to good and bad habits.
Linka A Odom/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Ian Anderson, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Gizem Ceylan, Yale University, and Wendy Wood, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Is social media designed to reward people for acting badly?

The answer is clearly yes, given that the reward structure on social media platforms relies on popularity, as indicated by the number of responses – likes and comments – a post receives from other users. Black-box algorithms then further amplify the spread of posts that have attracted attention.

Sharing widely read content, by itself, isn’t a problem. But it becomes a problem when attention-getting, controversial content is prioritized by design. Given the design of social media sites, users form habits to automatically share the most engaging information regardless of its accuracy and potential harm. Offensive statements, attacks on out groups and false news are amplified, and misinformation often spreads further and faster than the truth.

We are two social psychologists and a marketing scholar. Our research, presented at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit, shows that social media actually has the ability to create user habits to share high-quality content. After a few tweaks to the reward structure of social media platforms, users begin to share information that is accurate and fact-based.

The problem with habit-driven misinformation-sharing is significant. Facebook’s own research shows that being able to share already shared content with a single click drives misinformation. Thirty-eight percent of views of text misinformation and 65% of views of photographic misinformation come from content that has been reshared twice, meaning a share of a share of a share of an original post. The biggest sources of misinformation, such as Steve Bannon’s War Room, exploit social media’s popularity optimization to promote controversy and misinformation beyond their immediate audience.

YouTube video
How social media algorithms drive misinformation.

Re-targeting rewards

To investigate the effect of a new reward structure, we gave financial rewards to some users for sharing accurate content and not sharing misinformation. These financial rewards simulated the positive social feedback, such as likes, that users typically receive when they share content on platforms. In essence, we created a new reward structure based on accuracy instead of attention.

As on popular social media platforms, participants in our research learned what got rewarded by sharing information and observing the outcome, without being explicitly informed of the rewards beforehand. This means that the intervention did not change the users’ goals, just their online experiences. After the change in reward structure, participants shared significantly more content that was accurate. More remarkably, users continued to share accurate content even after we removed rewards for accuracy in a subsequent round of testing. These results show that users can be given incentives to share accurate information as a matter of habit.

A different group of users received rewards for sharing misinformation and for not sharing accurate content. Surprisingly, their sharing most resembled that of users who shared news as they normally would, without any financial reward. The striking similarity between these groups reveals that social media platforms encourage users to share attention-getting content that engages others at the expense of accuracy and safety.

Engagement and the bottom line

Maintaining high levels of user engagement is crucial for the financial model of social media platforms. Attention-getting content keeps users active on the platforms. This activity provides social media companies with valuable user data for their primary revenue source: targeted advertising.

In practice, social media companies might be concerned that changing user habits could reduce users’ engagement with their platforms. However, our experiments demonstrate that modifying users’ rewards does not reduce overall sharing. Thus, social media companies can build habits to share accurate content without compromising their user base.

Platforms that give incentives for spreading accurate content can foster trust and maintain or potentially increase engagement with social media. In our studies, users expressed concerns about the prevalence of fake content, leading some to reduce their sharing on social platforms. An accuracy-based reward structure could help restore waning user confidence.

Doing right and doing well

Our approach, using the existing rewards on social media to create incentives for accuracy, tackles misinformation spread without significantly disrupting the sites’ business model. This has the additional advantage of altering rewards instead of introducing content restrictions, which are often controversial and costly in financial and human terms.

Implementing our proposed reward system for news sharing carries minimal costs and can be easily integrated into existing platforms. The key idea is to provide users with rewards in the form of social recognition when they share accurate news content. This can be achieved by introducing response buttons to indicate trust and accuracy. By incorporating social recognition for accurate content, algorithms that amplify popular content can leverage crowdsourcing to identify and amplify truthful information.

Both sides of the political aisle now agree that social media has challenges, and our data pinpoints the root of the problem: the design of social media platforms.The Conversation

Ian Anderson, Ph.D. Student in Social Psychology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Gizem Ceylan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Management, Yale University, and Wendy Wood, Provost Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Business, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Conversation

Measles can ravage the immune system and brain, causing long-term damage – a virologist explains

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theconversation.com – Peter Kasson, Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology – 2025-03-31 07:16:00

Measles infections send 1 in 5 people to the hospital.
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Peter Kasson, Georgia Institute of Technology

The measles outbreak that began in west Texas in late January 2025 continues to grow, with 400 confirmed cases in Texas and more than 50 in New Mexico and Oklahoma as of March 28.

Public health experts believe the numbers are much higher, however, and some worry about a bigger resurgence of the disease in the U.S. In the past two weeks, health officials have identified potential measles exposures in association with planes, trains and automobiles, including at Washington Dulles International Airport and on an Amtrak train from New York City to Washington, D.C. – as well as at health care facilities where the infected people sought medical attention.

Measles infections can be extremely serious. So far in 2025, 14% of the people who got measles had to be hospitalized. Last year, that number was 40%. Measles can damage the lungs and immune system, and also inflict permanent brain damage. Three in 1,000 people who get the disease die. But because measles vaccination programs in the U.S. over the past 60 years have been highly successful, few Americans under 50 have experienced measles directly, making it easy to think of the infection as a mere childhood rash with fever.

As a biologist who studies how viruses infect and kill cells and tissues, I believe it is important for people to understand how dangerous a measles infection can be.

Underappreciated acute effects

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. One person who has it will infect nine out of 10 people nearby if those people are unvaccinated. A two-dose regimen of the vaccine, however, is 97% effective at preventing measles.

When the measles virus infects a person, it binds to specific proteins on the surface of cells. It then inserts its genome and replicates, destroying the cells in the process. This first happens in the upper respiratory tract and the lungs, where the virus can damage the person’s ability to breathe well. In both places, the virus also infects immune cells that carry it to the lymph nodes, and from there, throughout the body.

YouTube video
Measles can wipe out immune cells’ ability to recognize pathogens.

What generally lands people with measles in the hospital is the disease’s effects on the lungs. As the virus destroys lung cells, patients can develop viral pneumonia, which is characterized by severe coughing and difficulty breathing. Measles pneumonia afflicts about 1 in 20 children who get measles and is the most common cause of death from measles in young children.

The virus can directly invade the nervous system and also damage it by causing inflammation. Measles can cause acute brain damage in two different ways: a direct infection of the brain that occurs in roughly 1 in 1,000 people, or inflammation of the brain two to 30 days after infection that occurs with the same frequency. Children who survive these events can have permanent brain damage and impairments such as blindness and hearing loss.

Yearslong consequences of infection

An especially alarming but still poorly understood effect of measles infection is that it can reduce the immune system’s ability to recognize pathogens it has previously encountered. Researchers had long suspected that children who get the measles vaccine also tend to have better immunity to other diseases, but they were not sure why. A study published in 2019 found that having a measles infection destroyed between 11% and 75% of their antibodies, leaving them vulnerable to many of the infections to which they previously had immunity. This effect, called immune amnesia, lasts until people are reinfected or revaccinated against each disease their immune system forgot.

Occasionally, the virus can lie undetected in the brain of a person who recovered from measles and reactivate typically seven to 10 years later. This condition, called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, is a progressive dementia that is almost always fatal. It occurs in about 1 in 25,000 people who get measles but is about five times more common in babies infected with measles before age 1.

Researchers long thought that such infections were caused by a special strain of measles, but more recent research suggests that the measles virus can acquire mutations that enable it to infect the brain during the course of the original infection.

There is still much to learn about the measles virus. For example, researchers are exploring antibody therapies to treat severe measles. However, even if such treatments work, the best way to prevent the serious effects of measles is to avoid infection by getting vaccinated.The Conversation

Peter Kasson, Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Supreme Court considers whether states may prevent people covered by Medicaid from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider

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theconversation.com – Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law, University of Virginia – 2025-04-02 17:04:00

Planned Parenthood clinics, like this one in Los Angeles, are located across the United States.
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Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia and Sonia Suter, George Washington University

Having the freedom to choose your own health care provider is something many Americans take for granted. But the Supreme Court is weighing whether people who rely on Medicaid for their health insurance have that right, and if they do – is it enforceable by law?

That’s the key question at the heart of a case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, that began during President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

“There’s a right, and the right is the right to choose your doctor,” said Justice Elena Kagan on April 2, 2025, during oral arguments on the case. John J. Bursch, the Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer who is representing South Carolina Director of Health and Human Services Eunice Medina, countered that none of the words in the underlying statute had what he called a “rights-creating pedigree.”

As law professors who teach courses about health and poverty law as well as reproductive justice, we think this case could affect access to health care for 72 million Americans, including low-income people and their children and people with disabilities.

Excluding Planned Parenthood

The case started with Julie Edwards, who is enrolled in Medicaid and lives in South Carolina. After she struggled to get contraceptive services, she was able to receive care from a Planned Parenthood South Atlantic clinic in Columbia, South Carolina.

Planned Parenthood, an array of nonprofits with roots that date back more than a century, is among the nation’s top providers of reproductive services. It operates two clinics in South Carolina, where Medicaid patients can get physical exams, cancer screenings, contraception and other services. It also provides same-day appointments and keeps long hours.

In July 2018, however, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order that barred health care providers in South Carolina that offer abortions from reimbursement through Medicaid.

That meant Planned Parenthood, a longtime target of conservatives’ ire, would no longer be reimbursed for any type of care for Medicaid patients, preventing Edwards from transferring all her gynecological care to that office as she had hoped to do.

Planned Parenthood and Edwards sued South Carolina, claiming that the state was violating the federal Medicare and Medicaid Act, which Congress passed in 1965, by not letting Edwards obtain care from the provider of her choice.

A ‘free-choice-of-provider’ requirement

Medicaid operates as a partnership between the federal government and the states. Congress passed the law that led to its creation based on its power under the Constitution’s spending clause, which allows Congress to subject federal funds to certain requirements.

Two years later, due to concerns that states were restricting which providers Medicaid recipients could choose, Congress added a “free-choice-of-provider” requirement to the program. It states that people enrolled in Medicaid “may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required.”

This provision is at the core of this case. At issue is whether a civil rights statute provides a right for Medicaid beneficiaries to sue a state when their federal rights have been violated. Known as Section 1983, it was enacted in 1871.

Bursch, backed by the Trump administration, argued before the court that the absence of words like “right” in the Medicaid provision that requires states to provide a free choice of provider means that neither Edwards nor Planned Parenthood has the authority to file a lawsuit to enforce this aspect of the Medicaid statute.

Nicole A. Saharsky, Planned Parenthood’s lawyer, argued that the creation of a right shouldn’t depend on “some kind of magic words test.” Instead, she said it was clear that the Medicaid statute created “a right to choose their own doctor” because “it’s mandatory” that the state provide this option to everyone with health insurance through Medicaid.

She also emphasized that Congress wanted to protect “an intensely personal right” to be able “to choose your doctor, the person that you see when you’re at your most vulnerable, facing … some of the most significant … challenges to your life and your health.”

Restricting Medicaid funds

Through a federal law known as the Hyde Amendment, Medicaid cannot reimburse health care providers for the cost of abortions, with a few exceptions: when a patient’s life is at risk or her pregnancy is due to rape or incest. Some states do cover abortion when their laws allow it, without using any federal funds.

Therefore, Planned Parenthood only gets federal Medicaid funds for abortions in those limited circumstances.

McMaster explained that he removed “abortion clinics,” including Planned Parenthood, from the South Carolina Medicaid Program because he didn’t want state funds to indirectly subsidize abortions.

South Carolina “decided that Planned Parenthood was unqualified for many reasons, chiefly because they’re the nation’s largest abortion provider,” Bursch told the Supreme Court.

But only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services nationwide last year were related to abortion. Its most common service is testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Across the nation, Planned Parenthood provides health care to more than 2 million patients per year, most of whom have low incomes.

Man with gray hair in a suit and red tie speaks at a podium.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster speaks to a crowd during an election night party on Nov. 3, 2020, in Columbia.
Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Section 1983

Because the Medicaid statute itself does not allow an individual to sue, Edwards and Planned Parenthood are relying on Section 1983.

Lower courts have repeatedly upheld that the Medicaid statute provides Edwards with the right to obtain Medicaid-funded health care at her local Planned Parenthood clinic.

And the Supreme Court has long recognized that Section 1983 protects an individual’s ability to sue when their rights under a federal statute have been violated.

In 2023, for example, the court found such a right under the Medicaid Nursing Home Reform Act. The court held that Section 1983 confers the right to sue when a statute’s provisions “unambiguously confer individual federal rights.”

Consequences beyond South Carolina

The court’s decision in the Medina case on whether Medicaid patients can choose their own health care provider could have consequences far beyond South Carolina. Arkansas, Missouri and Texas have already barred Planned Parenthood from getting reimbursed by Medicaid for any kind of health care. More states could follow suit.

In addition, given Planned Parenthood’s role in providing expansive contraceptive care, disqualifying it from Medicaid could harm access to health care and increase the already-high unintended pregnancy rate in America.

The ramifications, likewise, could extend beyond the finances of Planned Parenthood.

If the court rules in South Carolina’s favor, states could also try to exclude providers based on other characteristics, such as whether their employees belong to unions or if they provide their patients with gender-affirming care, further restricting patients’ choices.

Or, as Kagan observed, states could go the opposite direction and exclude providers that don’t provide abortions and so forth. What’s really at stake, she said, is whether a patient is “entitled to see” the provider they choose regardless of what their state happens to “think about contraception or abortion or gender transition treatment.”

If the Supreme Court rules that Edwards does have a right to get health care at a Planned Parenthood clinic, the controversy would not be over. The lower courts would then have to decide whether South Carolina appropriately removed Planned Parenthood from Medicaid as an “unqualified provider.”

And if the Supreme Court rules in favor of South Carolina, then Planned Parenthood could still sue South Carolina over its decision to find them to be unqualified.The Conversation

Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law, University of Virginia and Sonia Suter, Professor of Law, George Washington University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Feeling FOMO for something that’s not even fun? It’s not the event you’re missing, it’s the bonding

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theconversation.com – Jacqueline Rifkin, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Cornell University – 2025-04-02 07:48:00

They had so much fun without me.
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Jacqueline Rifkin, Cornell University; Barbara Kahn, University of Pennsylvania, and Cindy Chan, University of Toronto

Imagine you’ve planned the trip of a lifetime for your animal-loving family: a cruise to Antarctica with the unique opportunity to view penguins, whales and other rare wildlife. Your adventure-loving kids can kayak through fjords, plunge into icy water and camp under the Antarctic sky.

But rather than being ecstatic, as you anticipated, your kids whine about skipping an after-school scout meeting at a neighbor’s house. Missing this ordinary weekly event triggers such intense FOMO – “fear of missing out” – for them that they don’t want to go on your amazing expedition.

If this kind of debacle sounds familiar to you – or at least if you find it perplexing – you’re not alone. The three of us are marketing professors and social psychologists who focus on how consumers make decisions and how this shapes well-being. We’ve been studying FOMO for over a decade and recently published our work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Over the years, we’ve learned what really drives intense feelings of FOMO – which explains why a run-of-the-mill meeting might feel more crucial than an over-the-top vacation.

FOMO’s real trigger

People use the term FOMO in many different ways. In our research, we focus on a very specific type of FOMO: the kind that occurs when people miss out on events that involve valued social connections.

With this kind of FOMO, we found that the pain of missing out is not related to missing the actual event or opportunity – although that could be there as well. The FOMO we study happens when people miss the chance to bond with friends, co-workers or teammates they care about.

So, the critical part of FOMO is missing out on interactions with people you value. FOMO about a group dinner at a restaurant isn’t really about the food and great lighting. Nor is FOMO about a concert just about the band’s performance. Instead, it’s about the lost opportunity to connect and make memories with people who are important to you.

Why is this upsetting? Imagine the scenario where all your best friends go out to dinner without you. They bond and make lasting memories with each other – and you’re not there for any of it.

If they get closer to each other, where does that leave you? What happens to your social relationships and your sense of belonging? Do you become a less important friend? Less worthy of future invites? Or even kicked out of the group altogether? The anxiety of FOMO can begin to spiral.

People with what psychologists call an anxious attachment style chronically fear rejection and isolation from others. Because FOMO involves anxiety about future social belonging, it may not come as a surprise that people who are naturally more anxious about their friendships tend to get more intense FOMO. When we asked people in one of our studies to scroll social media until they encountered something social they missed, we found that the more anxiously attached a participant was, the more intense FOMO they experienced.

cheerful group laughing together around an outdoor dining table
They’ll always remember that summer cookout – and you weren’t there.
Maskot/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Not just missing Coachella

Getting FOMO for an amazing event you can’t attend makes sense. But if FOMO is less about the event itself and more about the social bonding, what happens when you miss something that’s not really fun at all?

We find that people anticipate FOMO even for unenjoyable missed events. As long as there is some form of missed social bonding, feelings of FOMO emerge. One of our studies found that people anticipated more FOMO from missing an un-fun event that their friends would be at, than a fun event without their friends.

For better or for worse, sad and stressful events can often be emotionally bonding: Going to a funeral to support a friend, cleaning up the mess after a party, or even white-knuckling through a harrowing initiation ceremony can all offer opportunities to forge stronger connections with one another. Stressful contexts like these can be fertile grounds for FOMO.

How to fend off FOMO

Popular discussions about the negative consequences of FOMO tend to focus on the FOMO people feel from compulsively scrolling on social media and seeing what they missed out on. Consequently, much of the suggested advice on how to mitigate FOMO centers on turning off phones or taking a vacation from social media.

Those recommendations may be tough for many people to execute. Plus, they address the symptoms of FOMO, not the cause.

Our finding that the core of FOMO is anxiety about missed social relationships yields a simpler strategy to combat it: Reminding yourself of the last time you connected with close friends may provide a sense of security that staves off feelings of FOMO.

In an experiment testing multiple interventions, we asked 788 study participants to look through their social media feeds until they encountered a post of a missed social event. We asked about 200 of these participants to immediately rate how much FOMO they were feeling. They averaged a 3.2 on a 1-to-7 scale.

Another group of about 200 participants also scrolled through their social media feeds until they encountered a post of a missed social event. But before indicating how much FOMO they were feeling, we asked them to think back to a prior experience socializing and bonding with their friends. Encouragingly, this reflection exercise seemed to curtail FOMO. Their average FOMO rating was 2.7 out of 7, a significant drop.

group of older women on a neighborhood walk with a leashed dog
Reminding yourself about other good times with your pals can help keep FOMO at bay.
AJ_Watt/E+ via Getty Images

With the remaining participants, we tested other strategies for mitigating FOMO – thinking about the next time they might see their friends or imagining what they’d say to a FOMO-suffering friend – but the simple reflection exercise was by far the most promising.

So, reminding yourself of the meaningful relationships you already have and reaffirming your social belonging in the moment may help combat the rush of anxiety that is characteristic of FOMO.

And missing out on social bonding experiences doesn’t have to be anxiety-provoking. In fact, in our activity-packed, hectic lives, missing some “must-attend” events may be a welcome relief – especially if you remind yourself that your social belonging is not in jeopardy. Cue a recent wave of counter-FOMO programming called JOMO, or “Joy of Missing Out.”

To quote Stuart Smalley, the fictional self-help guru of 1990s “Saturday Night Live,” reminding yourself that “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” might be just the trick to mitigate FOMO.The Conversation

Jacqueline Rifkin, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Cornell University; Barbara Kahn, Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing, University of Pennsylvania, and Cindy Chan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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