Explore All Articles

We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is strongly correlated with right-leaning partisanship, we also uncover a similar, though weaker, trend among left-leaning users.

The increasing amount of information online makes it challenging to judge what to believe or discredit. Fact-checking unverified claims shared on platforms, like social media, can play a critical role in correcting misbeliefs. The current study demonstrates how the effect of fact-checking can vary by several factors.

This paper studies conspiracy and debunking narratives about the origins of COVID-19 on a major Chinese social media platform, Weibo, from January to April 2020. Popular conspiracies about COVID-19 on Weibo, including that the virus is human-synthesized or a bioweapon, differ substantially from those in the United States.

Written by Irene V. Pasquetto, Briony Swire-Thompson, Michelle A. Amazeen, Fabrício Benevenuto, Nadia M. Brashier, Robert M. Bond, Lia C. Bozarth, Ceren Budak, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Lisa K. Fazio, Emilio Ferrara, Andrew J. Flanagin, Alessandro Flammini, Deen Freelon, Nir Grinberg, Ralph Hertwig, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Kenneth Joseph, Jason J.

We present Harmony Square, a short, free-to-play online game in which players learn how political misinformation is produced and spread. We find that the game confers psychological resistance against manipulation techniques commonly used in political misinformation: players from around the world find social media content making use of these techniques significantly less reliable after playing, are more confident in their ability to spot such content, and less likely to report sharing it with others in their network. 

We analyze original survey data on support for social media companies’ fact-checking of politicians in general and President Trump in particular. We find overwhelming majorities of Democrats support fact-checking in both instances, while a majority of Republicans support fact-checking of politicians in general but not of President Trump.

Tweets about “plandemic” (e.g., #plandemic)—the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned or fraudulent—helped to spread several distinct conspiracy theories related to COVID-19. But the term’s catchy nature attracted attention from anti-vaccine activist filmmakers who ultimately created Plandemic the 26-minute documentary.

This research examines the content, timing, and spread of COVID-19 misinformation and subsequent debunking efforts for two COVID-19 myths. COVID-19 misinformation tweets included more non-specific authority references (e.g., “Taiwanese experts”, “a doctor friend”), while debunking tweets included more specific and verifiable authority references (e.g.,

WhatsApp was alleged to have been widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during the 2018 elections in Brazil and the 2019 elections in India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale.