Impact of correcting misinformation on social disruption

Ryusuke Iizuka; Fujio Toriumi; Mao Nishiguchi; Masanori Takano; Mitsuo Yoshida

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0265734

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 12, 2021
1 Sep 2021 Decision Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor PONE-D-21-18422 Impact of Correcting Misinformation on Social Disruption PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Iizuka, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. The manuscript needs a MAJOR REVISION. Please follow the suggestions given by the reviewers. In particular, the manuscript should be improved by improving the description and by adding a comparison with existing methodologies. Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 15 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 3. Thanks for stating that you'll provide the Tweet IDs upon accept. Please ensure that you are complying with Twitter's Terms of Service (https://twitter.com/en/tos) in regards to data sharing. If there are restrictions in publicly sharing Tweet IDs, please do include an updated Data Availability Statement in your cover letter. We will update your Data Availability Statement on your behalf if needed. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Partly Reviewer #3: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The authors models the effects of misinformation reduction and the diffusion of corrective information on social disruption and clarifies their effects on social disruption. This is a very interesting research. The manuscript is concise and well written. My major concerns are as follows: (1) The authors stated that, the major contribution of the study is the "impact of corrective information on society and clarifies its appropriate amount as against the previous studies that concentrated on the impact of corrective information on attitudes toward misinformation". I think the author need to give more clarification on the bases of their justification. For example, what are the issues in the previous studies that the authors were able to identify and improve upon in this study? (2) The authors fails to make comparism of their methods with the existing models in the research domain to demonstrate the effectiveness of their methods. Reviewer #2: # This paper need a lot of English editing and improving the flow of the work. # The Discussion section need to be expanded and more informative. The discussion of the main findings must be clear. # The whole paper must be re-arranged and organized like this for example (Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussions and finally Conclusions. In the introduction the related works, the research gaps and the main objective on this work must be clearly reported. All things related to the dataset and the regression methods should be written in the methodology. # I advised the authors to check some published examples in order to know how to arrange their work. Reviewer #3: 1. Please reduce the Figure size and keep them clear. 2. Please check few typing mistakes such as page no. 2 line no. 61. 3. Please try to keep the tables near to the text so that it would be easy to read. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: Yes:** Krishna Mohan Kudiri [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. 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Revision 1
9 Jan 2022 Author Response Dear Editor and Reviewers: Thank you for reviewing our paper, “Impact of correcting misinformation on social disruption.” We appreciate all the comments, which were constructive and helpful for improving the manuscript. Please refer to our responses below and the revised parts in the main paper. The revised parts are highlighted. We trust that our revisions are satisfactory, but we are happy to consider further amendments if requested. Reviewer #1 (1) The authors stated that, the major contribution of the study is the "impact of corrective information on society and clarifies its appropriate amount as against the previous studies that concentrated on the impact of corrective information on attitudes toward misinformation". I think the author need to give more clarification on the bases of their justification. For example, what are the issues in the previous studies that the authors were able to identify and improve upon in this study? Response 1: Thank you for your insightful comments. Our contributions can be briefly summarized as follows 1) We observed that people behaved as if they had believed misinformation even if the original misinformation was not spread to them. 2) Our results suggest that such behavior is caused by pluralistic ignorance due to spreading excessive corrective information. 3) Under such a situation, we used simulation experiments to show that the appropriate amount of corrective information to spread depends on the amount of misinformation spread. We described the differences between previous studies and our study in more detail in the Discussion section (p.15-16, ll.554-596), in order to clarify our contribution. (2) The authors fails to make comparism of their methods with the existing models in the research domain to demonstrate the effectiveness of their methods. Response 2: The main contribution of our study is not the proposal of any new methods, but the detection of new phenomena. The method used is principal component regression, which is often used and works well. Therefore, it is not necessary for us to newly verify the effectiveness of this method. Reviewer #2: # This paper need a lot of English editing and improving the flow of the work. Response 1: Thank you for providing important comments. As for the English, the text was revised by a professional editing service. Regarding the flow of the work, we have revised the text to match the typical section structure as follows. A description of the overall flow of this research has been added to the Materials and Methods section. We wrote about the statistical analysis in Study 1 and about the simulation in Study 2. In Study 1, we described the modeling method and its results. Study 2 covers the purpose, methods, results, and discussion of each of the three simulations. # The Discussion section need to be expanded and more informative. The discussion of the main findings must be clear. Response 2: Our main findings are as follows: 1) We observed that people behaved as if they had believed misinformation even if the original misinformation was not spread to them. 2) Our results suggest that such behavior is caused by pluralistic ignorance due to spreading excessive corrective information. 3) Under such a situation, we used simulation experiments to show that the appropriate amount of corrective information to spread depends on the amount of misinformation spread. We clarify these findings by discussing the consistencies and differences between our results and previous works (see the Discussion section (p.15-16, ll.554-596)). # The whole paper must be re-arranged and organized like this for example (Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussions and finally Conclusions. In the introduction the related works, the research gaps and the main objective on this work must be clearly reported. All things related to the dataset and the regression methods should be written in the methodology. # I advised the authors to check some published examples in order to know how to arrange their work. Response 3: According to this comment, we revised the section structure of our manuscript based on the conventions in the literature (see Response 1). Reviewer #3: 1. Please reduce the Figure size and keep them clear. Response 1: Thank you for your helpful comments. The size of the figures may be due to the submission system of PLOS ONE. When published, they will be of the appropriate size. 2. Please check few typing mistakes such as page no. 2 line no. 61. Response 2: We checked this and made the necessary revisions. 3. Please try to keep the tables near to the text so that it would be easy to read. Response 3: We checked and revised them. Editor 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf Response 1: We checked and revised them. 2. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 3. Thanks for stating that you'll provide the Tweet IDs upon accept. Response 2: We attached the IDs of tweets and retweets as supporting information. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.rtf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265734.r002
8 Mar 2022 Decision Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor Impact of correcting misinformation on social disruption PONE-D-21-18422R1 Dear Dr. Iizuka, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Barbara Guidi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #3: No ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I have gone through the revised version of the manuscript entitled "Impact of correcting misinformation on social disruption". All the comments raised have been attended to by the authors. Reviewer #3: This paper is well written and well organized. Good work. The results are clearer, but please check the size of the tables because those were very long and maybe creating a problem to keep the paper into proper format. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #3: Yes:** Krishna Mohan Kudiri https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265734.r003
Formally Accepted
25 Mar 2022 Acceptance Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor PONE-D-21-18422R1 Impact of correcting misinformation on social disruption Dear Dr. Iizuka: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Barbara Guidi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265734.r004

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