Explore All Articles

By Topic

By Author

All Articles

Article Topic

Older Americans are more vulnerable to prior exposure effects in news evaluation

Benjamin A. Lyons

Older news users may be especially vulnerable to prior exposure effects, whereby news comes to be seen as more accurate over multiple viewings. I test this in re-analyses of three two-wave, nationally representative surveys in the United States (N = 8,730) in which respondents rated a series of mainstream, hyperpartisan, and false political headlines (139,082 observations).

Keep Reading

Designing misinformation interventions for all: 
Perspectives from AAPI, Black, Latino, and Native American community leaders on misinformation educational efforts

Angela Y. Lee, Ryan C. Moore and Jeffrey T. Hancock

This paper examines strategies for making misinformation interventions responsive to four communities of color. Using qualitative focus groups with members of four non-profit organizations, we worked with community leaders to identify misinformation narratives, sources of exposure, and effective intervention strategies in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), Black, Latino, and Native American communities.

Keep Reading

Community-based strategies for combating misinformation: Learning from a popular culture fandom

Jin Ha Lee, Nicole Santero, Arpita Bhattacharya, Emma May and Emma S. Spiro

Through the lens of one of the fastest-growing international fandoms, this study explores everyday misinformation in the context of networked online environments. Findings show that fans experience a range of misinformation, similar to what we see in other political, health, or crisis contexts.

Keep Reading

Digital literacy is associated with more discerning accuracy judgments but not sharing intentions

Nathaniel Sirlin, Ziv Epstein, Antonio A. Arechar and David G. Rand

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.

Keep Reading

Review of social science research on the impact of countermeasures against influence operations

Laura Courchesne, Julia Ilhardt and Jacob N. Shapiro

Despite ongoing discussion of the need for increased regulation and oversight of social media, as well as debate over the extent to which the platforms themselves should be responsible for containing misinformation, there is little consensus on which interventions work to address the problem of influence operations and disinformation campaigns.

Keep Reading
Research Note

Research note: This photograph has been altered: Testing the effectiveness of image forensic labeling on news image credibility

Cuihua Shen, Mona Kasra and James F. O’Brien

Despite the ubiquity of images and videos in online news environments, much of the existing research on misinformation and its correction is solely focused on textual misinformation, and little is known about how ordinary users evaluate fake or manipulated images and the most effective ways to label and correct such falsities.

Keep Reading

Where’s the fake news at? European news consumers’ perceptions of misinformation across information sources and topics

Michael Hameleers, Anna Brosius and Claes H. de Vreese

This study indicates that news users across ten different European countries are quite concerned about misinformation in their information environment. Respondents are most likely to associate politicians, corporations, and foreign actors with misinformation. They perceive misinformation to be most common for topics like immigration, the economy, and the environment.

Keep Reading
Research Note

Research note: Likes, sarcasm and politics: Youth responses to a platform-initiated media literacy campaign on social media

Ioana Literat, Abubakr Abdelbagi, Nicola YL Law, Marcus Y-Y Cheung and Rongwei Tang

To better understand youth attitudes towards media literacy education on social media, and the opportunities and challenges inherent in such initiatives, we conducted a large-scale analysis of user responses to a recent media literacy campaign on TikTok. We found that reactions to the campaign were mixed, and highly political in nature.

Keep Reading

Propaganda

“A most mischievous word”: Neil Postman’s approach to propaganda education

Renee Hobbs

Before there was a term called media literacy education, there was an interdisciplinary group of writers and thinkers who taught people to guard themselves against the manipulative power of language. One of the leaders of this group was Neil Postman, known for his best-selling book published in 1985, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Keep Reading