NEWSLETTER: Misinformation Review Digest

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Recent Articles

Declining information quality under new platform governance

Burak Özturan, Alexi Quintana-Mathé, Nir Grinberg, Katherine Ognyanova and David Lazer

Following the leadership transition on October 27, 2022, Twitter/X underwent a notable change in platform governance. This study investigates how these changes influenced information quality for registered U.S. voters and the platform more broadly. We address this question by analyzing two complementary datasets—a Twitter panel and a Decahose sample.

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Commentary

Gendered disinformation as violence: A new analytical agenda

Marília Gehrke and Eedan R. Amit-Danhi

The potential for harm entrenched in mis- and disinformation content, regardless of intentionality, opens space for a new analytical agenda to investigate the weaponization of identity-based features like gender, race, and ethnicity through the lens of violence. Therefore, we lay out the triangle of violence to support new studies aiming to investigate multimedia content, victims, and audiences of false claims.

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Research Note

Feedback and education improve human detection of image manipulation on social media

Adnan Hoq, Matthew J. Facciani and Tim Weninger

This study investigates the impact of educational interventions and feedback on users’ ability to detect manipulated images on social media, addressing a gap in research that has primarily focused on algorithmic approaches. Through a pre-registered randomized and controlled experiment, we found that feedback and educational content significantly improved participants’ ability to detect manipulated images on social media.

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Disagreement as a way to study misinformation and its effects

Damian Hodel and Jevin D. West

Experts consider misinformation a significant societal concern due to its associated problems like political polarization, erosion of trust, and public health challenges. However, these broad effects can occur independently of misinformation, illustrating a misalignment with the narrow focus of the prevailing misinformation concept.

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State media tagging does not affect perceived tweet accuracy: Evidence from a U.S. Twitter experiment in 2022

Claire Betzer, Montgomery Booth, Beatrice Cappio, Alice Cook, Madeline Gochee, Benjamin Grayzel, Leyla Jacoby, Sharanya Majumder, Michael Manda, Jennifer Qian, Mitchell Ransden, Miles Rubens, Mihir Sardesai, Eleanor Sullivan, Harish Tekriwal, Ryan Waaland and Brendan Nyhan

State media outlets spread propaganda disguised as news online, prompting social media platforms to attach state-affiliated media tags to their accounts. Do these tags reduce belief in state media misinformation? Previous studies suggest the tags reduce misperceptions but focus on Russia, and current research does not compare these tags with other interventions.

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How alt-tech users evaluate search engines: Cause-advancing audits

Evan M. Williams and Kathleen M. Carley

Search engine audit studies—where researchers query a set of terms in one or more search engines and analyze the results—have long been instrumental in assessing the relative reliability of search engines. However, on alt-tech platforms, users often conduct a different form of search engine audit.

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