Issue 3

This article analyzes 62 bills introduced in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies between 2019–2022 to understand how legislators frame disinformation into different problems and their respective solutions. The timeframe coincides with the administration of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. The study shows a tendency from legislators of parties opposed to Bolsonaro to attempt to criminalize the creation and spread of health-related and government-led disinformation.

For the last decade, policymakers, journalists, and scientists have continued to alert us of the threat of misinformation for making sound decisions in the political, health, and environmental domains. In this study, we evaluate whether perceiving misinformation as a threat affects media use, particularly considering selection of media sources that are politically aligned.

This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative.

This article describes partisan-based, accuracy-based, and action-based discussions through which U.S. social media users and journalists express concerns about social media misinformation. While platform policy stands out as the most highly discussed topic by both social media users and journalists, much of it is cast through a party politics lens.

We applied a mixed-methods approach with the goal of understanding how Latinx and Asian diaspora communities perceive and experience the spread of misinformation through encrypted messaging apps in the United States. Our study consists of 12 in-depth interviews with leaders of relevant diaspora community organizations and a computer-assisted content analysis of 450,300 messages published on Telegram between July 2020 and December 2021.

Observed corrections of misinformation on social media can encourage more accurate beliefs, but for these benefits to occur, corrections must happen. By exploring people’s perceptions of witnessing and performing corrections on social media, we find that many people say they observe and perform corrections across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have introduced new complexities and risks to information environments, as synthetic media may facilitate the spread of misinformation and erode public trust. This study examines the prevalence and characteristics of synthetic media on social media platform X from December 2022 to September 2023.

In a preliminary analysis of 121,984 posts from X (formerly known as Twitter) containing the hashtag #SaveTheChildren, we found that conspiratorial posts received more engagement than authentic hashtag activism between January 2022 and March 2023. Conspiratorial posts received twice the number of reposts as non-conspiratorial content.

Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts.

This study integrates research on negativity bias and misinformation, as a comparison of how systematic (negativity) and incidental (misinformation) challenges to the news are perceived differently by audiences. Through a cross-country survey, we found that both challenges are perceived as highly salient and disruptive.