Browsing HKS Misinformation Review by Title

Now showing items 3-22 of 26

    • Blame is in the eye of the beholder: Beyond an ethics of hubris and shame in the time of COVID-19 

      Pelizza, A. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020)
      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 ...

    • Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation 

      Roozenbeek, Jon; van der Linden, Sander (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020-11)
      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 ...

    • Conspiracy and debunking narratives about COVID-19 origins on Chinese social media: How it started and who is to blame 

      Chen, Kaiping; Chen, Anfan; Zhang, Jingwen; Meng, Jingbo; Shen, Cuihua (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020-12)
      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 ...

    • COVID-19 disinformation and political engagement among communities of color: The role of media literacy 

      Austin, E.W.; Borah, P.; Domgaard, S. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      Communities of color, suffering equity gaps and disproportionate COVID-19 effects, also must resist ongoing disinformation campaigns designed to impede their political influence. A representative, national survey (N=1264) ...

    • COVID-19 misinformation and the 2020 US presidential election 

      Chen, E.; Chang, H.; Rao, A.; Lerman, K.; Cowan, G.; Ferrara, E. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      Voting is the defining act for a democracy. However, voting is only meaningful if public deliberation is grounded in veritable and equitable information. This essay investigates the politicization of public health practices ...

    • The different forms of COVID-19 misinformation and their consequences 

      Enders, Adam M.; Uscinski, Joseph E.; Klofstad, Casey; Stoler, Justin (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020-11)
      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 ...

    • Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news 

      Nkonde, M.; Rodriguez, M. Y.; Cortana, L.; Mukogosi, J. K.; King, S.; Serrato, R.; Martinez, N.; Drummer, M.; Lewis, A.; Malik, M.M. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      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 ...

    • Examining false beliefs about voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election 

      Pennycook, Gordon; Rand, D.G. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election saw an unprecedented number of false claims alleging election fraud and arguing that Donald Trump was the actual winner of the election. Here we report a survey exploring belief in these ...

    • Identifying patterns to prevent the spread of misinformation during epidemics 

      Nsoesie, E.O.; Oladeji, O. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020)
      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, ...

    • International policy perspectives on global atmospheric change: Expanding the range of options 

      Clark, William (1989)

    • Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course 

      Breakstone, J.; Smith, M.; Connors, P.; Ortega, T.; Kerr, D.; Wineburg, S. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      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 ...

    • The presence of unexpected biases in online fact-checking 

      Park, S.; Park, J.Y.; Kang, J.; Cha, M. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      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 presumed influence of election misinformation on others reduces our own satisfaction with democracy 

      Nisbet, E.C.; Mortenson, C.; Li, Q. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      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, ...

    • Promoting health literacy during the COVID-19 pandemic: A call to action for healthcare professionals 

      Damian, A.J.; Gallo, J.J. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020)
      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 ...

    • Redesigning consent: Big data, bigger risks 

      Donovan, Joan (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020)
      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 ...

    • The Relation between Media Consumption and Misinformation at the Outset of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic in the US 

      Jamieson, Kathleen Hall; Albarracin, Dolores (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, 2020)
      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 ...

    • Repress/redress: What the “war on terror” can teach us about fighting misinformation 

      Abrahams, A.; Lim, G. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020)
      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 ...

    • Research note: Bolsonaro’s firehose: How Covid-19 disinformation on WhatsApp was used to fight a government political crisis in Brazil 

      Soares, F.B.; Recuero, R.; Volcan, T.; Fagundes, G.; Sodré, G. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      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 ...

    • Research note: Does the public support fact-checking social media? It depends who and how you ask 

      Rich, Timothy S.; Milden, Ian; Wagner, Mallory Treece (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2020-11)
      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 ...

    • Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation 

      Nikolov, D.; Flammini, A.; Menczer, F. (Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2021)
      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 ...