# Community Fact-Checks Trigger Moral Outrage in Replies to Misleading Posts on Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08829/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14132/) (2025)
- [Community Moderation and the New Epistemology of Fact Checking on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20067/) (2025)
- [Uncovering the Bigger Picture: Comprehensive Event Understanding Via Diverse News Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19758/) (2025)
- [Truth with a Twist: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Professional vs. Community-Authored Fact-Checks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14105/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.