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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced college students to spend more time online. Yet many studies show that college students struggle to discern fact from fiction on the Internet. A small body of research suggests that students in face-to-face settings can improve at judging the credibility of online sources.

We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is strongly correlated with right-leaning partisanship, we also uncover a similar, though weaker, trend among left-leaning users.

The increasing amount of information online makes it challenging to judge what to believe or discredit. Fact-checking unverified claims shared on platforms, like social media, can play a critical role in correcting misbeliefs. The current study demonstrates how the effect of fact-checking can vary by several factors.

In this essay, we conduct a descriptive content analysis from a sample of a dataset made up of 534 thousand scraped tweets, supplemented with access to 1.36 million tweets from the Twitter firehose, from accounts that used the #ADOS hashtag between November 2019 and September 2020.

This paper studies conspiracy and debunking narratives about the origins of COVID-19 on a major Chinese social media platform, Weibo, from January to April 2020. Popular conspiracies about COVID-19 on Weibo, including that the virus is human-synthesized or a bioweapon, differ substantially from those in the United States.

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, an understanding of the structure and organization of beliefs in pandemic conspiracy theories and misinformation becomes increasingly critical for addressing the threat posed by these dubious ideas. In polling Americans about beliefs in 11 such ideas, we observed clear groupings of beliefs that correspond with different individual-level characteristics (e.g.,

We present Harmony Square, a short, free-to-play online game in which players learn how political misinformation is produced and spread. We find that the game confers psychological resistance against manipulation techniques commonly used in political misinformation: players from around the world find social media content making use of these techniques significantly less reliable after playing, are more confident in their ability to spot such content, and less likely to report sharing it with others in their network. 

Platforms are increasingly using transparency, whether it be in the form of political advertising disclosures or a record of page name changes, to combat disinformation campaigns. In the case of state-controlled media outlets on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter this has taken the form of labeling their connection to a state.

Health experts worry that a COVID-19 vaccine boycott could inhibit reaching “herd immunity,” and their concerns have only grown as the pandemic has spread. Concern has largely focused on anti-vaccine protestors, who captured headlines as they stood side by side with Tea Party activists and armed militia groups demonstrating against the quarantine in April and May of this year.

Tweets about “plandemic” (e.g., #plandemic)—the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned or fraudulent—helped to spread several distinct conspiracy theories related to COVID-19. But the term’s catchy nature attracted attention from anti-vaccine activist filmmakers who ultimately created Plandemic the 26-minute documentary.