HKS Misinformation Review

As misinformation and disinformation spread more rapidly and widely than ever before, individuals have been encouraged to be critical consumers of all received information. At the heart of this point of contention is the question of where responsibility and fault should lie. This framing and dynamic have taken a new form during the COVID-19 pandemic: a risk that the narrative of victim-blaming may overcome narratives of care and responsibility, at all levels and across national contexts. This begs the question of which ethical assumptions individuals and institutions will build upon in navigating the crisis and developing policies and best practices for everyday life, as well as for what will come next?

When Italy became the western center of the COVID-19 outbreak, it also became the focus of a series of states-sponsored coordinated disinformation campaigns. From early March through May 2020, disinformation operations in the country have increased noticeably, showing evidence of evolving strategies from multiple state actors geared towards reshaping the narrative of the global COVID-19 crisis and pushing forward geopolitical interests. Such campaigns may be a sign of things to come with Italy as a critical battleground subject to state-sponsored disinformation operations, acting as a gauge of power relations particularly between the United States, Russia, the EU, and China.

With over 30,000 confirmed cases, Brazil is currently the country most affected by COVID-19 in Latin America, and ranked 12th worldwide. Despite all evidence, a strong rhetoric undermining risks associated to COVID-19 has been endorsed at the highest levels of the Brazilian government, making President Jair Bolsonaro the leader of the “coronavirus-denial movement”. To support this strategy, different forms of misinformation and disinformation have been leveraged to lead a dangerous crusade against scientific and evidence-based recommendations.

Over the last decade, the rapid proliferation of social media platforms coupled with the advancement of computational methods for collecting, processing, and analyzing big datasets created new opportunities for social science. But alongside new insights about the behaviors of individuals and groups, these practices raise new questions regarding what constitutes ethical research. Most critically, current disinformation scholars face a replication crisis exacerbated by uneven access to datasets, where social media users are unaware of their participation in academic research. Establishing scientific norms, where research is shared with the individuals whose data are accessed and processed in the name of science, involves redesigning consent and providing universal public access to databases. Ultimately, without methodological norms for disinformation studies, the field will continue to be dominated by corporate interests, further endangering the public’s trust in disinformation research.

The governance of online platforms has unfolded across three eras – the era of Rights (which stretched from the early 1990s to about 2010), the era of Public Health (from 2010 through the present), and the era of Process (of which we are now seeing the first stirrings). Rights-era conversations and initiatives amongst regulators and the public at large centered dominantly on protecting nascent spaces for online discourse against external coercion. The values and doctrine developed in the Rights era have been vigorously contested in the Public Health era, during which regulators and advocates have focused (with minimal success) on establishing accountability for concrete harms arising from online content, even where addressing those harms would mean limiting speech. In the era of Process, platforms, regulators, and users must transcend this stalemate between competing values frameworks, not necessarily by uprooting Rights-era cornerstones like CDA 230, but rather by working towards platform governance processes capable of building broad consensus around how policy decisions are made and implemented. Some first steps in this direction, preliminarily explored here, might include making platforms “content fiduciaries,” delegating certain key policymaking decisions to entities outside of the platforms themselves, and systematically archiving data and metadata about disinformation detected and addressed by platforms.

This paper discusses patterns of public health misinformation observed during infectious disease epidemics. Specifically, we group epidemic-related misinformation into four categories: transmission, prevention, treatment, and vaccination. By developing tools, algorithms, and other resources around these categories, institutions, companies, and individuals can proactively limit and counter the spread of misinformation and its potential negative health effects.

Misinformation, like terrorism, thrives where trust in conventional authorities has eroded. An informed policy response must therefore complement efforts to repress misinformation with efforts to redress loss of trust. At present, however, we are repeating the mistakes of the war on terror, prioritizing repressive, technologically deterministic solutions while failing to redress the root sociopolitical grievances that cultivate our receptivity to misinformation in the first place.

A US national probability-based survey during the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 spread in the US showed that, above and beyond respondents’ political party, mainstream broadcast media use (e.g., NBC News) correlated with accurate information about the disease's lethality, and mainstream print media use (e.g., the New York Times) correlated with accurate beliefs about protection from infection. In addition, conservative media use (e.g., Fox News) correlated with conspiracy theories including believing that some in the CDC were exaggerating the seriousness of the virus to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. Five recommendations are made to improve public understanding of SARS-CoV-2.

The extraordinary spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic is impressive. And, to public health professionals like us, it’s worrying: We know that good information and good health go hand in hand. Knowing what we do about the practice of public health and what the science tells us about how people fall for misinformation, we see promising strategies for intervention in our own field. We therefore call on fellow healthcare professionals to take concerted action against misinformation, and we suggest here one lever our field is perfectly situated to address: health literacy. In this commentary, we propose concrete strategies for colleagues at four levels of practice: in healthcare organizations, community-based partnerships, cross-sector collaborations, and as individual healthcare providers.

Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group identities. The groups affected spanned the ideological spectrum, suggesting the importance of coordinated counterresponses from diverse coalitions of users.

The governance of online platforms has unfolded across three eras – the era of Rights (which stretched from the early 1990s to about 2010), the era of Public Health (from 2010 through the present), and the era of Process (of which we are now seeing the first stirrings). Rights-era conversations and initiatives amongst regulators and the public at large centered dominantly on protecting nascent spaces for online discourse against external coercion. The values and doctrine developed in the Rights era have been vigorously contested in the Public Health era, during which regulators and advocates have focused (with minimal success) on establishing accountability for concrete harms arising from online content, even where addressing those harms would mean limiting speech. In the era of Process, platforms, regulators, and users must transcend this stalemate between competing values frameworks, not necessarily by uprooting Rights-era cornerstones like CDA 230, but rather by working towards platform governance processes capable of building broad consensus around how policy decisions are made and implemented. Some promising steps in this direction could include delegating certain key policymaking decisions to entities outside of the platforms themselves; making platforms “information” or “content” fiduciaries; and systematically archiving data and metadata about disinformation detected and addressed by platforms.

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.

We analyze original survey data on support for social media companies’ fact-checking of politicians in general and President Trump in particular. We find overwhelming majorities of Democrats support fact-checking in both instances, while a majority of Republicans support fact-checking of politicians in general but not of President Trump. Moreover, we find those concerned about contracting COVID-19 are more likely to support fact-checks. Rather than viewing fact-checks as a cure-all, we argue the importance of acknowledging their limitations and identifying when and on whom efforts may be effective.

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., support for Trump, distrust of scientists) and behavioral intentions (e.g., to take a vaccine, to engage in social activities). Moreover, we found that conspiracy theories enjoy more support, on average, than misinformation about dangerous health practices. Our findings suggest several paths for policymakers, communicators, and scientists to minimize the spread and impact of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories.

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. They attribute more responsibility to the United States than to China, especially following Sino-U.S. confrontations. Compared to conspiracy posts, debunking posts are associated with lower user participation but higher mobilization. Debunking narratives can be more engaging when they come from women and influencers and cite scientists. Our findings suggest that conspiracy narratives can carry highly cultural and political orientations. Correction efforts should consider political motives and identify important stakeholders to reconstruct international dialogues toward intercultural understanding.

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. We show that fact-checking helps self-correct one's views among young adults. However, this effect is weaker for individuals who perceived the claim negatively at first. Furthermore, borderline messages like “Lack of Evidence” can be perceived as false rather than neutral. We explain these biases via human cognitive mechanisms that avoid risk and uncertainty.

Brazil has one of the highest rates of cases and deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the world. Two factors contributed to the high rates: the Brazilian government underestimated the pandemic and a large amount of disinformation was spread through social media. We found that disinformation about Covid-19 on WhatsApp was associated with political disinformation, mostly composed to support president Bolsonaro during the crisis he faced at the beginning of the pandemic. Our main finding implicates that disinformation on WhatsApp was connected to the far-right political discourse and framed Covid-19 as a political issue rather than a public health issue.

Pervasive political misinformation threatens the integrity of American electoral democracy but not in the manner most commonly examined. We argue the presumed influence of misinformation (PIM) may be just as pernicious, and widespread, as any direct influence that political misinformation may have on voters. Our online survey of 2,474 respondents in the United States shows that greater attention to political news heightens PIM on others as opposed to oneself, especially among Democrats and Independents. In turn, PIM on others reduces satisfaction with American electoral democracy, eroding the “virtuous circle” between news and democracy, and possibly commitment to democracy in the long-term.

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. But what about asynchronous remote instruction? In an asynchronous college nutrition course at a large state university, we embedded modules that taught students how to vet websites using fact checkers’ strategies. Chief among these strategies was lateral reading, the act of leaving an unknown website to consult other sources to evaluate the original site. Students improved significantly from pretest to posttest, engaging in lateral reading more often post intervention. These findings inform efforts to scale this type of intervention in higher education.