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Fact-checking on social media matters more than ever. When Meta abandoned professional fact checkers in 2025 in favour of crowd-sourced annotations, it bet that community participation could substitute for institutional expertise. Our systematic review of 21 empirical studies of social media fact-checking (2022–2025) suggests the picture is more complicated than it appears.

This article examines how fact checkers in the EU perceive and respond to tensions between their journalistic commitment to political fact-checking and platform partnership rules that restrict the rating of politicians’ claims. Drawing on interviews and survey responses, we find that they understand their work through a journalistic role conception, including a commitment to scrutinizing political elites.

Climate change amplifies natural disasters, posing an existential threat to our society. However, a digital storm is raging on right-wing extremist Telegram channels where climate disinformation works to delegitimize scientific consensus. Investigating the factors that amplify climate disinformation is as critical to combating it as understanding natural disasters and their drivers. We

Major platforms constantly claim to fight disinformation and support the fact checking community, but their transparency reports and the empirical evidence from a survey of expert fact checkers across 21 EU countries show a different reality. This study finds that despite commitments made under EU regulations, expert fact checkers remain largely peripheral actors within the existing platform governance framework, with limited insight into how their work influences platform decisions.

Social media platforms are increasingly using community-based verification systems, such as Community Notes, and AI systems to flag and contextualize potentially misleading content at scale. While these approaches promise speed and broad coverage, concerns about accuracy, bias, and transparency persist. Drawing on interviews with 29 fact checkers, we find that practitioners see community-based verification and AI Note Writers as complementary tools that can support, but not replace, professional fact-checking.

Media have made misinformation conversations part of daily life. We looked at nearly four decades’ worth of news stories about misinformation to see exactly what this coverage looked like. We searched five major U.S. daily newspapers for articles containing the misinformation-related terms—disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theory, fake news, and propaganda—then extracted words in proximity to these key terms to identify associative patterns.

Rather than assuming that people are motivated to fact-check, we investigated the process that people go through when and if they encounter political misinformation. Using a digital diary method, we asked 38 participants to collect examples of political misinformation during Australia’s 2025 federal election and explain why they determined it to be misinformation (n = 254).

In today’s digital media environment, emotionally resonant narratives often spread faster and stick more firmly than verifiable facts. This paper explores how emotionally charged communication in online controversies fosters not only widespread engagement but also the participatory nature of misinformation. Through a case study of a K-pop controversy, we show how audiences act not just as consumers but as co-authors of alternative narratives in moments of uncertainty.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often grouped together, but do people believe in them for the same reasons? This study examines how these conceptually distinct forms of deceptive content are processed and believed using the COVID-19 pandemic as context. Surprisingly, despite their theoretical differences, belief in both is predicted by similar psychological factors—particularly conspiracy mentality and the perception that truth is politically constructed—suggesting that underlying distrust in institutions may outweigh differences in types of deceptive content in shaping susceptibility.

What if knowing how social media algorithms work doesn’t make you a more responsible digital citizen, but a more cynical one? A new survey of U.S. young adults finds that while higher algorithmic awareness and knowledge are linked to greater concerns about misinformation and filter bubbles, individuals with greater algorithmic awareness and knowledge are less likely to correct misinformation or engage with opposing viewpoints on social media—possibly reflecting limited algorithmic agency.