Measuring the effect of Facebook’s downranking interventions against groups and websites that repeatedly share misinformation
Emmanuel M. Vincent, Héloïse Théro and Shaden Shabayek
Facebook has claimed to fight misinformation notably by reducing the virality of posts shared by “repeat offender” websites. The platform recently extended this policy to groups. We identified websites and groups that repeatedly publish false information according to fact checkers and investigated the implementation and impact of Facebook’s measures against them.
Research note: Explicit voter fraud conspiracy cues increase belief among co-partisans but have broader spillover effects on confidence in elections
Benjamin A. Lyons and Kaitlyn S. Workman
In this pre-registered experiment, we test the effects of conspiracy cue content in the context of the 2020 U.S. elections. Specifically, we varied whether respondents saw an explicitly stated conspiracy theory, one that was merely implied, or none at all. We found that explicit cues about rigged voting machines increase belief in such theories, especially when the cues target the opposing political party.
Clarity for friends, confusion for foes: Russian vaccine propaganda in Ukraine and Serbia
Katrina Keegan
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.
Who is afraid of fake news? Modeling risk perceptions of misinformation in 142 countries
Aleksi Knuutila, Lisa-Maria Neudert and Philip N. Howard
Using survey data from 154,195 respondents in 142 countries, we investigate internet user perceptions of the risks associated with being exposed to misinformation. We find that: 1) The majority of regular internet users globally (58.5%) worry about misinformation, and young and low-income groups are most likely to be concerned. 2) Risk perception among internet users varies starkly across regions whereby concern is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (74.2%), and lowest in South Asia (31.2%). 3)