Conference Paper
Can Individuals Be Inoculated against Fake News: An Experimental Study on a Sample of Egyptian X Users
No.
ERF32AC_75
Publisher
ERF
Date
May, 2026
Topic
D. Microeconomics
The spread of fake news has been shown to have alarming political and social consequences. In this paper, we examine whether providing a short training to social media users can help them resist fake news, measured by how far they believe them and their tendency to share them. Our design tests a hypothesis which assumes that individuals can be inoculated with mental antibodies against fake news – just as individuals get vaccinated against viruses. We test this hypothesis via a pre-registered online experiment, conducted on Egyptian X users (formerly Twitter). We recruited our subjects from a sample of trend engagers who interacted with the top trending keywords/hashtags over two months, in addition to a booster sample of university students. The experiment entailed randomly assigning subjects into a control group, a treatment that trained them on scientific reasoning, and another that briefed them on the possibility of inflicting social harm when sharing fake news. The findings show that both treatments were effective in reducing the belief in fake news, whereas only the scientific treatment was effective in curbing the tendency to share such news. The paper contributes to the literature on resisting misinformation by testing the inoculation theory on actual X users; a traditionally under-researched sample.