Explore All Articles

By Topic

By Author

All Articles

Article Topic

Journalistic interventions matter: Understanding how Americans perceive fact-checking labels

Chenyan Jia and Taeyoung Lee

While algorithms and crowdsourcing have been increasingly used to debunk or label misinformation on social media, such tasks might be most effective when performed by professional fact checkers or journalists. Drawing on a national survey (N = 1,003), we found that U.S. adults evaluated fact-checking labels created by professional fact checkers as more effective than labels by algorithms and other users. News

Keep Reading

Correcting campaign misinformation: Experimental evidence from a two-wave panel study 

Laszlo Horvath, Daniel Stevens, Susan Banducci, Raluca Popp and Travis Coan

In this study, we used a two-wave panel and a real-world intervention during the 2017 UK general election to investigate whether fact-checking can reduce beliefs in an incorrect campaign claim, source effects, the duration of source effects, and how predispositions including political orientations and prior exposure condition them.

Keep Reading

“Fact-checking” fact checkers: A data-driven approach

Sian Lee, Aiping Xiong, Haeseung Seo and Dongwon Lee

This study examined four fact checkers (Snopes, PolitiFact, Logically, and the Australian Associated Press FactCheck) using a data-driven approach. First, we scraped 22,349 fact-checking articles from Snopes and PolitiFact and compared their results and agreement on verdicts. Generally, the two fact checkers agreed with each other, with only one conflicting verdict among 749 matching claims after adjusting minor rating differences.

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

Fact-checking Trump’s election lies can improve confidence in U.S. elections: Experimental evidence

Catie Snow Bailard, Ethan Porter and Kimberly Gross

As the 2020 campaign unfolded, with a mix of extraordinary embellishments and outright falsehoods, President Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the U.S. electoral system grew louder and more frequent. Trump-aligned Republican candidates have since advanced similar false claims in their own campaigns in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections.

Keep Reading

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.

Keep Reading
Research Note

Research note: Tiplines to uncover misinformation on encrypted platforms: A case study of the 2019 Indian general election on WhatsApp

Ashkan Kazemi, Kiran Garimella, Gautam Kishore Shahi, Devin Gaffney and Scott A. Hale

There is currently no easy way to discover potentially problematic content on WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted platforms at scale. In this paper, we analyze the usefulness of a crowd-sourced tipline through which users can submit content (“tips”) that they want fact-checked.

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

The battleground of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Facebook: Fact checkers vs. misinformation spreaders

Aimei Yang, Jieun Shin, Alvin Zhou, Ke M. Huang-Isherwood, Eugene Lee, Chuqing Dong, Hye Min Kim, Yafei Zhang, Jingyi Sun, Yiqi Li, Yuanfeixue Nan, Lichen Zhen and Wenlin Liu

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.

Keep Reading