The Promises and Pitfalls of Growing Public Participation in Fact-Checking: Reflection of Technical and Cultural Factors in Asian Societies

This study provides an overview of the ongoing discussion on public participation in fact-checking. Based on an extensive literature review, the study highlights a series of psychological, cultural, and technical factors that deserve further attention, and critically discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the growing public participation in fact-checking on social media platforms. Misinformation can influence both personal and societal decisions in detrimental ways. Not only is misinformation challenging to correct, the credibility of fact-check messages provided by individual social media users often require further verification. Furthermore, certain cultural factors in Asian societies have implications for fact-checking participation on social media, such as individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance. The influence of cultural factors on public fact-checking behaviors is often contingent on a variety of other factors at different levels of analysis, which further complicate the efforts to interpret, understand and validate issues for fact-checking. Given the complexity of today's technological environment, social media facilitate an interconnected mode of information exchange. Hence, public fact-checking should be regarded as a type of networked behavior rather than a simple and straightforward cognitive process, and raises a series of important questions that center around the platform infrastructures.