Is a 🖼️ worth a thousand words?

We know that millions of people around the world get their news online, with social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp now being the go-to news source among young people in the UK and right across the Global South.

Inevitably, nestled in with all those hashtags, memes, stories and videos is bad information—which has the potential to cause real harm to people’s lives.

But what makes us sit up and pay attention to the correct stuff, through all the noise? For the fact checkers I work with and our partners across the world, it’s an uphill battle.

Luckily, latest research shows us what does and doesn’t work.

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

If we want to grab attention, the research tells us that visuals are key.

It makes sense. We can probably all recall dozens of car manufacturers’ logos, even when we don’t drive—or fast food chains, even if we prefer not to cook our own food. That’s because we tend to notice and remember images, more than the words which accompany them.

It works the same way on social media, where still images are shown to be twice more engaging than video posts, and four times more engaging than text-only posts in fact checks.

When it comes to understanding the information in a fact check, however, it’s a different story.

A clear, jargon-free article is still the best way for audiences to understand and remember what a fact check says.

Here’s three reasons why format matters in fact checking

1. We’re more likely to see it

Posts with pictures are significantly more likely to be shared than those with just headlines, and play a bigger part in audiences’ desire to read an article than the the news outlet cited, or the social connection who shared it.

2. We’re more likely to believe it

Several experiments found that a general statement, such as “macadamia nuts are in the same family as peaches”, is believed more when it is accompanied by a picture of the nuts, than when it occurs on its own.

3. It affects our learning

Beyond the element of attention grabbing and “truthiness” however, formats also matter because they affect what audiences learn. This is where things get complicated.

While visuals stimulate engagement, they are not always best placed to help convey the information they contain. An image mirroring the conclusions of an article can help readers recall it, by stimulating different parts of the brain and giving them a “double dose” of the same information.

In other cases however, extra sounds and sights can fatigue and distract us—particularly if they don’t match with the text.

An experiment which showed readers different versions of a fact check found that the effectiveness of the correction was influenced by the extent to which contextual details - such as accompanying visuals - mirrored, or diverged from the overall conclusion.

So how do we get the balance right?

As far as images go, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that our gaze is drawn towards faces, bright colours, and emotion. But in the case of recall and understanding, clear, jargon-free text comes up trumps.

If the fact checking community wants to get it right, it’s a matter of striking a balance. Commanding attention is only half of the story. If we want to stamp out bad information for good, we can’t underestimate the power of some well-written copy.