earticle

영어

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unsubstantiated information concerning vaccines and the coronavirus has proliferated on various social media platforms. Consequently, we have considered viable actions to mitigate the impact of such unverified content, enabling individuals to use social media platforms more effectively and minimize any ensuing confusion. Recent measures in this area have included YouTube’s practice of labeling vaccine or corona videos as authoritative when emanating from reputable organizations and Twitter’s practice of flagging vaccine-related content as potentially misleading or taken out of context. This study seeks to explore how such contrasting labeling practices influence users’ believability and engagement differentially, while also examining the moderating impact of regulatory focus. The results indicate that authoritative labeling positively influenced users’ believability and engagement, whereas misleading labeling adversely affected users’ believability and engagement. Additionally, our findings revealed that authoritative labeling has a stronger impact on promotion-focused individuals, while misleading labeling has a more pronounced effect on prevention- focused individuals. Our findings offer insights into how social media platforms can design and present information to their users, taking into account their regulatory focus.