Mitigating Misinformation in User-Generated Discourse

Interactive content in online spaces is often meant to inform a broad audience regarding issues of societal interest. Recently, combating misinformation has emerged as another task requiring interventions to reach broad audiences. We are engaged in two efforts to investigate how lay users leverage social media to inform and engage a broader audience and the characteristics of the resulting user-generated discourse. We found that tailoring content for broader audiences can be laborious and the impact of the efforts is neither guaranteed nor immediately apparent. Our future work will focus on approaches to help lay users mitigate these problems.