Rather than assuming that people are motivated to fact-check, we investigated the process that people go through when and if they encounter political misinformation. Using a digital diary method, we asked 38 participants to collect examples of political misinformation during Australia’s 2025 federal election and explain why they determined it to be misinformation (n = 254).

In today’s digital media environment, emotionally resonant narratives often spread faster and stick more firmly than verifiable facts. This paper explores how emotionally charged communication in online controversies fosters not only widespread engagement but also the participatory nature of misinformation. Through a case study of a K-pop controversy, we show how audiences act not just as consumers but as co-authors of alternative narratives in moments of uncertainty.

Boosting psychological defences against misleading content online is an active area of research, but transition from the lab to real-world uptake remains a challenge. We developed a 19-second prebunking video about emotionally manipulative content and showed it as a Story Feed ad to N = 375,597 Instagram users in the United Kingdom.

When a bank run, a pandemic, or an election spirals out of control, the spark is often informational. In 2023, rumors online helped accelerate the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. During COVID-19, false claims about vaccines fueled preventable harms by undermining public trust in health guidance, and election lies in the United States fed into the broader dynamics that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.

What if nearly everything we think we know about misinformation came from just a sliver of the world? When research leans heavily on online studies from a few wealthy nations, we risk drawing global conclusions from local noise. A WhatsApp group of fishermen, a displaced community in a refugee camp, or a bustling market in the Global South are not marginal examples of information environments; such contexts call for an evolution of how we study misinformation.

This research note investigates the aftermath of YouTube’s global ban on Russian state-affiliated media channels in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Using over 12 million YouTube comments across 40 Russian-language channels, we analyzed the effectiveness of the ban and the shifts in user activity before and after the platform’s intervention.