A focus shift in the evaluation of misinformation interventions

A range of recent events has demonstrated the potential for misinformation to incur costly consequences for individuals and societies (e.g., health behaviours) (Bursztyn et al., 2020; Council of Canadian Academies, 2023; Loomba et al., 2021; Simonov et al., 2021). Accordingly, research on interventions to counter misinformation has seen a rapid increase (see Ecker et al., 2022; Kozyreva, Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2022). Whilst these efforts have led to important insights, one critical question remains underexplored: how should misinformation interventions be evaluated? Considering that real-world implementation of interventions inevitably involves trade-offs, holistic assessment is necessary to ensure that agencies and communicators do not waste resources on interventions that may be ineffective or, at worst, backfire. To this end, traditional approaches that (1) apply the common practice of intervention-effect maximization and (2) rely mainly on questionnaire measures to gauge intervention impact are likely insufficient. We, therefore, call for a shift in the focus of assessments of misinformation interventions.