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The governance of online platforms has unfolded across three eras – the era of Rights (which stretched from the early 1990s to about 2010), the era of Public Health (from 2010 through the present), and the era of Process (of which we are now seeing the first stirrings).

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of interest in misinformation and its role in elections. Research by news outlets, government agencies, and academics alike has shown that millions of Americans have been exposed to dubious political news online. However, relatively little research has focused on documenting the effects of consuming this content.

Survey experiments with nearly 7,000 Americans suggest that increasing the visibility of publishers is an ineffective, and perhaps even counterproductive, way to address misinformation on social media. Our findings underscore the importance of social media platforms and civil society organizations evaluating interventions experimentally rather than implementing them based on intuitive appeal.

Volume 1, Issue 1 Editorial

By Irene Pasquetto

For the scope of this publication, we use the term “misinformation” to refer to all kinds of false or inaccurate information, independently from the fact that such information was deliberately created and spread to deceive.