One alternative is a source rating based on past articles that gets attached to every new article as it is published, much like Amazon or eBay seller ratings.The most useful ratings are those a person can use at the most relevant time – finding out about previous buyers’ experiences with a seller when considering making an online purchase, for instance.When it comes to facts, though, there’s another wrinkle. E-commerce ratings are typically done by regular users, people with firsthand knowledge from using the item or service.Fact-checking, on the other hand, has traditionally been done by experts like PolitiFact because few people have the firsthand knowledge to rate news. By comparing user-generated ratings and expert-generated ratings, we’ve found that different rating mechanisms influence users in different ways.We conducted two online experiments, with a total of 889 participants. Each person was shown a group of headlines, some labeled with accuracy ratings from experts, others labeled with ratings from other users and the remainder with no accuracy ratings at all.We asked participants the extent to which they believed each headline and whether they would read the article, like it, comment or share it.A sample headline with a rating from experts, as shown in our experiment.Kim et al., CC BY-NDA sample headline with a rating from other users, as shown in our experiment.Kim et al., CC BY-NDExpert ratings of news sources had stronger effects on belief than ratings from nonexpert users, and the effects were even stronger when the rating was low, suggesting the source was likely to be inaccurate. These low-rated inaccurate sources are the usual culprits in spreading disinformation, so our finding suggests that expert ratings are even more powerful when users need them most.Respondents’ belief in a headline influenced the extent to which they would engage with it: The more they believed an article was true the more likely they were to read, like, comment on or share the article.Those findings tell us that helping users mistrust inaccurate material at the moment they encounter it can help curb the spread of disinformation.