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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.

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.

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)

Using a survey conducted in July 2020, we establish a divide in the news sources partisans prefer for information about the COVID-19 pandemic and observe partisan disagreements in beliefs about the virus. These divides persist when respondents face financial costs for incorrectly answering questions.

This research examines how false beliefs shape perceptions of government transparency in times of crisis. Measuring transparency perceptions using both closed- and open-ended questions drawn from a Canadian panel survey, we show that individuals holding false beliefs about COVID-19 are more likely to have negative perceptions of government transparency.

On 3 September 2021, the Russian court forbade Google and Yandex to display search results for “Smart Voting,” the query referring to a tactical voting project by the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. To examine whether the two search engines complied with the court order, we collected top search outputs for the query from Google and Yandex.

We study how citizens engage with misinformation on Twitter in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that misinformation regarding facemasks is not corrected through counter-arguments or fact-checking. Instead, many tweets rejecting misinformation use humor to mock misinformation spreaders, whom they pejoratively label wearers of “tinfoil hats.”

We studied the relationship between Facebook advertisements from Chinese state media on the global media environment by examining the link between advertisements and online news coverage of China by other countries. We found that countries that see a large increase in views of Facebook advertisement from Chinese state media also see news coverage of China become more positive.

It has been widely argued that social media users with low digital literacy—who lack fluency with basic technological concepts related to the internet—are more likely to fall for online misinformation, but surprisingly little research has examined this association empirically. In a large survey experiment involving true and false news posts about politics and COVID-19, we found that digital literacy is indeed an important predictor of the ability to tell truth from falsehood when judging headline accuracy.

Social media platforms label, remove, or otherwise intervene on thousands of posts containing misleading or inaccurate information every day. Who encounters these interventions, and how do they react? A demographically representative survey of 1,207 Americans reveals that 49% have been exposed to some form of online misinformation intervention.