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Seeing lies and laying blame: Partisanship and U.S. public perceptions about disinformation

Kaitlin Peach, Joseph Ripberger, Kuhika Gupta, Andrew Fox, Hank Jenkins-Smith and Carol Silva

Using data from a nationally representative survey of 2,036 U.S. adults, we analyze partisan perceptions of the risk disinformation poses to the U.S. government and society, as well as the actors viewed as responsible for and harmed by disinformation. Our findings indicate relatively high concern about disinformation across a variety of societal issues, with broad bipartisan agreement that disinformation poses significant risks and causes harms to several groups.

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Measuring what matters: Investigating what new types of assessments reveal about students’ online source evaluations

Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew and Mark Smith

A growing number of educational interventions have shown that students can learn the strategies fact checkers use to efficiently evaluate online information. Measuring the effectiveness of these interventions has required new approaches to assessment because extant measures reveal too little about the processes students use to evaluate live internet sources.

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Correcting campaign misinformation: Experimental evidence from a two-wave panel study 

Laszlo Horvath, Daniel Stevens, Susan Banducci, Raluca Popp and Travis Coan

In this study, we used a two-wave panel and a real-world intervention during the 2017 UK general election to investigate whether fact-checking can reduce beliefs in an incorrect campaign claim, source effects, the duration of source effects, and how predispositions including political orientations and prior exposure condition them.

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How different incentives reduce scientific misinformation online

Piero Ronzani, Folco Panizza, Tiffany Morisseau, Simone Mattavelli and Carlo Martini

Several social media employ or consider user recruitment as defense against misinformation. Yet, it is unclear how to encourage users to make accurate evaluations. Our study shows that presenting the performance of previous participants increases discernment of science-related news. Making participants aware that their evaluations would be used by future participants had no effect on accuracy.

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What do we study when we study misinformation? A scoping review of experimental research (2016-2022)

Gillian Murphy, Constance de Saint Laurent, Megan Reynolds, Omar Aftab, Karen Hegarty, Yuning Sun and Ciara M. Greene

We reviewed 555 papers published from 2016–2022 that presented misinformation to participants. We identified several trends in the literature—increasing frequency of misinformation studies over time, a wide variety of topics covered, and a significant focus on COVID-19 misinformation since 2020. We also identified several important shortcomings, including overrepresentation of samples from the United States and Europe and excessive emphasis on short-term consequences of brief, text-based misinformation.

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Research Note

User experiences and needs when responding to misinformation on social media

Pranav Malhotra, Ruican Zhong, Victor Kuan, Gargi Panatula, Michelle Weng, Andrea Bras, Connie Moon Sehat, Franziska Roesner and Amy Zhang

This study examines the experiences of those who participate in bottom-up user-led responses to misinformation on social media and outlines how they can be better supported via software tools. Findings show that users desire support tools designed to minimize time and effort in identifying misinformation and provide tailored suggestions for crafting responses to misinformation that account for emotional and relational context.

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