Issue 4

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.

We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies—attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely. We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels.

This essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, culture, and politics, and centers questions of power and inequality. In the United States, identity, particularly race, plays a key role in the messages and strategies of disinformation producers and who disinformation and misinformation resonates with.

Do emotions we experience after reading headlines help us discern true from false information or cloud our judgement? Understanding whether emotions are associated with distinguishing truth from fiction and sharing information has implications for interventions designed to curb the spread of misinformation.

We examine potential bias in Facebook’s 10-trillion cell URLs dataset, consisting of URLs shared on its platform and their engagement metrics. Despite the unprecedented size of the dataset, it was altered to protect user privacy in two ways: 1) by adding differentially private noise to engagement counts, and 2) by censoring the data with a 100-public-share threshold for a URL’s inclusion.