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This paper examines how Russia tailors its vaccine propaganda to hostile and friendly audiences, like Ukraine and Serbia. Web scraping of all articles about vaccines on Russian state-owned websites from December 2020 to November 2021 provided data for quantitative topic modeling and qualitative analysis.

Using a survey conducted in July 2020, we establish a divide in the news sources partisans prefer for information about the COVID-19 pandemic and observe partisan disagreements in beliefs about the virus. These divides persist when respondents face financial costs for incorrectly answering questions.

This research examines how false beliefs shape perceptions of government transparency in times of crisis. Measuring transparency perceptions using both closed- and open-ended questions drawn from a Canadian panel survey, we show that individuals holding false beliefs about COVID-19 are more likely to have negative perceptions of government transparency.

We study how citizens engage with misinformation on Twitter in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that misinformation regarding facemasks is not corrected through counter-arguments or fact-checking. Instead, many tweets rejecting misinformation use humor to mock misinformation spreaders, whom they pejoratively label wearers of “tinfoil hats.”

In the new information environment represented by the internet and social media platforms, information of public health importance is transmitted rapidly by decentralized, interpersonal networks rather than through traditional sources like public health officials or professional journalists, thus requiring a new approach to counteracting misinformation.

We analyzed community guidelines and official news releases and blog posts from 12 leading social media and messaging platforms (SMPs) to examine their responses to COVID-19 misinformation. While the majority of platforms stated that they prohibited COVID-19 misinformation, the responses of many platforms lacked clarity and transparency.

It has been widely argued that social media users with low digital literacy—who lack fluency with basic technological concepts related to the internet—are more likely to fall for online misinformation, but surprisingly little research has examined this association empirically. In a large survey experiment involving true and false news posts about politics and COVID-19, we found that digital literacy is indeed an important predictor of the ability to tell truth from falsehood when judging headline accuracy.

This article explores the ways in which offline conspiracist material concerned with Covid-19 is presented and structured through a content analysis of The Light, a newspaper produced and distributed by activists in the U.K. Our analysis shows that conspiracy theories related to Covid-19 are included alongside a range of other, non-conspiracist content and that readers encounter these ideas in a format which closely resembles a conventional newspaper.

Our study examines Facebook posts containing nine prominent COVID-19 vaccine misinformation topics that circulated on the platform between March 1st, 2020 and March 1st, 2021. We first identify misinformation spreaders and fact checkers,1fact checker in our study is defined as any public account (including both individual and organizational accounts) that posts factual information about COVID-19 vaccine or posts debunking information about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.