Zeve Sanderson, Megan A. Brown, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker
We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies—attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely. We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels. Additionally, the messages that had been blocked on Twitter remained popular on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, being posted more often and garnering more visibility than messages that had either been labeled by Twitter or received no intervention at all. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of considering content moderation at the ecosystem level.
{"title":"Twitter flagged Donald Trump’s tweets with election misinformation: They continued to spread both on and off the platform","authors":"Zeve Sanderson, Megan A. Brown, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker","doi":"10.37016/mr-2020-77","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-77","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies—attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely. We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels. Additionally, the messages that had been blocked on Twitter remained popular on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, being posted more often and garnering more visibility than messages that had either been labeled by Twitter or received no intervention at all. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of considering content moderation at the ecosystem level.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46376545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, culture, and politics, and centers questions of power and inequality. In the United States, identity, particularly race, plays a key role in the messages and strategies of disinformation producers and who disinformation and misinformation resonates with. Expanding what “counts” as disinformation demonstrates that disinformation is a primary media strategy that has been used in the U.S. to reproduce and reinforce white supremacy and hierarchies of power at the expense of populations that lack social, cultural, political, or economic power.
{"title":"Critical disinformation studies: History, power, and politics","authors":"Rachel Kuo, Alice E. Marwick","doi":"10.37016/mr-2020-76","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76","url":null,"abstract":"This essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, culture, and politics, and centers questions of power and inequality. In the United States, identity, particularly race, plays a key role in the messages and strategies of disinformation producers and who disinformation and misinformation resonates with. Expanding what “counts” as disinformation demonstrates that disinformation is a primary media strategy that has been used in the U.S. to reproduce and reinforce white supremacy and hierarchies of power at the expense of populations that lack social, cultural, political, or economic power.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47469588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jennifer Allen, M. Mobius, David M. Rothschild, D. Watts
We examine potential bias in Facebook’s 10-trillion cell URLs dataset, consisting of URLs shared on its platform and their engagement metrics. Despite the unprecedented size of the dataset, it was altered to protect user privacy in two ways: 1) by adding differentially private noise to engagement counts, and 2) by censoring the data with a 100-public-share threshold for a URL’s inclusion. To understand how these alterations affect conclusions drawn from the data, we estimate the preva-lence of fake news in the massive, censored URLs dataset and compare it to an estimate from a smaller, representative dataset. We show that censoring can substantially alter conclusions that are drawn from the Facebook dataset. Because of this 100-public-share threshold, descriptive statis-tics from the Facebook URLs dataset overestimate the share of fake news and news overall by as much as 4X. We conclude with more general implications for censoring data.
{"title":"Research note: Examining potential bias in large-scale censored data","authors":"Jennifer Allen, M. Mobius, David M. Rothschild, D. Watts","doi":"10.37016/mr-2020-74","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-74","url":null,"abstract":"We examine potential bias in Facebook’s 10-trillion cell URLs dataset, consisting of URLs shared on its platform and their engagement metrics. Despite the unprecedented size of the dataset, it was altered to protect user privacy in two ways: 1) by adding differentially private noise to engagement counts, and 2) by censoring the data with a 100-public-share threshold for a URL’s inclusion. To understand how these alterations affect conclusions drawn from the data, we estimate the preva-lence of fake news in the massive, censored URLs dataset and compare it to an estimate from a smaller, representative dataset. We show that censoring can substantially alter conclusions that are drawn from the Facebook dataset. Because of this 100-public-share threshold, descriptive statis-tics from the Facebook URLs dataset overestimate the share of fake news and news overall by as much as 4X. We conclude with more general implications for censoring data.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43689208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study indicates that news users across ten different European countries are quite concerned about misinformation in their information environment. Respondents are most likely to associate politicians, corporations, and foreign actors with misinformation. They perceive misinformation to be most common for topics like immigration, the economy, and the environment. This offers sup-port for the increasingly more relative and politicized status of facts in people’s credibility percep-tions. Yet, differences across sources and issues are relatively modest, indicating that misinfor-mation can be associated with many different information sources and topics.
{"title":"Where’s the fake news at? European news consumers’ perceptions of misinformation across information sources and topics","authors":"M. Hameleers, Anna Brosius, C. D. Vreese","doi":"10.37016/MR-2020-70","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/MR-2020-70","url":null,"abstract":"This study indicates that news users across ten different European countries are quite concerned about misinformation in their information environment. Respondents are most likely to associate politicians, corporations, and foreign actors with misinformation. They perceive misinformation to be most common for topics like immigration, the economy, and the environment. This offers sup-port for the increasingly more relative and politicized status of facts in people’s credibility percep-tions. Yet, differences across sources and issues are relatively modest, indicating that misinfor-mation can be associated with many different information sources and topics.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46896076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
To better understand youth attitudes towards media literacy education on social media, and the opportunities and challenges inherent in such initiatives, we conducted a large-scale analysis of user responses to a recent media literacy campaign on TikTok. We found that reactions to the cam-paign were mixed, and highly political in nature. While young people appreciated the urgency of media literacy education and understood its relevance to their social media participation, many displayed a sarcastic attitude, criticizing both the content and the dissemination of the campaign. Based on these responses, we identify key takeaways and recommendations that can valuably in-form future media literacy campaigns on social media.
{"title":"Research note: Likes, sarcasm and politics: Youth responses to a platform-initiated media literacy campaign on social media","authors":"Ioana Literat, Abubakr Abdelbagi, Nicola YL Law, Marcus Y-Y Cheung, Rongwei Tang","doi":"10.37016/MR-2020-67","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/MR-2020-67","url":null,"abstract":"To better understand youth attitudes towards media literacy education on social media, and the opportunities and challenges inherent in such initiatives, we conducted a large-scale analysis of user responses to a recent media literacy campaign on TikTok. We found that reactions to the cam-paign were mixed, and highly political in nature. While young people appreciated the urgency of media literacy education and understood its relevance to their social media participation, many displayed a sarcastic attitude, criticizing both the content and the dissemination of the campaign. Based on these responses, we identify key takeaways and recommendations that can valuably in-form future media literacy campaigns on social media.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41949318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A new disinformation age is upon us—or so it seems. But much of what appears to be unprecedent-ed is not new at all. Concerns about misinformation’s effects on democracy are as old as media. The many systemic failures abetting Trump’s ascendance—as well as more recent election- and pandem-ic-related conspiracies—were decades in the making. Yet, our degraded information systems es-caped sufficient scrutiny for so long. Why?
{"title":"Unseeing propaganda: How communication scholars learned to love commercial media","authors":"Victor W. Pickard","doi":"10.37016/MR-2020-66","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/MR-2020-66","url":null,"abstract":"A new disinformation age is upon us—or so it seems. But much of what appears to be unprecedent-ed is not new at all. Concerns about misinformation’s effects on democracy are as old as media. The many systemic failures abetting Trump’s ascendance—as well as more recent election- and pandem-ic-related conspiracies—were decades in the making. Yet, our degraded information systems es-caped sufficient scrutiny for so long. Why?","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43887915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Joel Breakstone, Mark D. Smith, P. Connors, Teresa Ortega, D. Kerr, S. Wineburg
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 nutri-tion course at a large state university, we embedded modules that taught students how to vet web-sites 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 im-proved significantly from pretest to posttest, engaging in lateral reading more often post interven-tion. These findings inform efforts to scale this type of intervention in higher education.
{"title":"Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course","authors":"Joel Breakstone, Mark D. Smith, P. Connors, Teresa Ortega, D. Kerr, S. Wineburg","doi":"10.37016/MR-2020-56","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/MR-2020-56","url":null,"abstract":"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 nutri-tion course at a large state university, we embedded modules that taught students how to vet web-sites 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 im-proved significantly from pretest to posttest, engaging in lateral reading more often post interven-tion. These findings inform efforts to scale this type of intervention in higher education.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49397189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ziv Epstein, Adam J. Berinsky, R. Cole, Andrew Gully, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand
Recent research suggests that shifting users’ attention to accuracy increases the quality of news they subsequently share online. Here we help develop this initial observation into a suite of deploy-able interventions for practitioners. We ask (i) how prior results generalize to other approaches for prompting users to consider accuracy, and (ii) for whom these prompts are more versus less effec-tive. In a large survey experiment examining participants’ intentions to share true and false head-lines about COVID-19, we identify a variety of different accuracy prompts that su¬ccessfully increase sharing
{"title":"Developing an accuracy-prompt toolkit to reduce COVID-19 misinformation online","authors":"Ziv Epstein, Adam J. Berinsky, R. Cole, Andrew Gully, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand","doi":"10.37016/MR-2020-71","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/MR-2020-71","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research suggests that shifting users’ attention to accuracy increases the quality of news they subsequently share online. Here we help develop this initial observation into a suite of deploy-able interventions for practitioners. We ask (i) how prior results generalize to other approaches for prompting users to consider accuracy, and (ii) for whom these prompts are more versus less effec-tive. In a large survey experiment examining participants’ intentions to share true and false head-lines about COVID-19, we identify a variety of different accuracy prompts that su¬ccessfully increase sharing","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46518320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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 sur-vey exploring belief in these false claims that was conducted three days after Biden was declared the winner. We find that a majority of Trump voters in our sample – particularly those who were more politically knowledgeable and more closely following election news – falsely believed that election fraud was widespread and that Trump won the election. Thus, false beliefs about the elec-tion are not merely a fringe phenomenon. We also find that Trump conceding or losing his legal challenges would likely lead a majority of Trump voters to accept Biden’s victory as legitimate, alt-hough 40% said they would continue to view Biden as illegitimate regardless. Finally, we found that levels of partisan spite and endorsement of violence were equivalent between Trump and Biden voters.
{"title":"Research note: Examining false beliefs about voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election","authors":"Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand","doi":"10.37016/MR-2020-51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/MR-2020-51","url":null,"abstract":"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 sur-vey exploring belief in these false claims that was conducted three days after Biden was declared the winner. We find that a majority of Trump voters in our sample – particularly those who were more politically knowledgeable and more closely following election news – falsely believed that election fraud was widespread and that Trump won the election. Thus, false beliefs about the elec-tion are not merely a fringe phenomenon. We also find that Trump conceding or losing his legal challenges would likely lead a majority of Trump voters to accept Biden’s victory as legitimate, alt-hough 40% said they would continue to view Biden as illegitimate regardless. Finally, we found that levels of partisan spite and endorsement of violence were equivalent between Trump and Biden voters.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45151694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leah R. Rosenzweig, Bence Bagó, Adam J. Berinsky, David G. Rand
Do emotions we experience after reading headlines help us discern true from false information or cloud our judgement? Understanding whether emotions are associated with distinguishing truth from fiction and sharing information has implications for interventions designed to curb the spread of misinformation. Among 1,341 Facebook users in Nigeria, we find that emotions—specifically happiness and surprise—are associated with greater belief in and sharing of false, relative to true, COVID-19 headlines. Respondents who are older are more reflective, and do not support the ruling party are better at discerning true from false COVID-19 information.
{"title":"Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria","authors":"Leah R. Rosenzweig, Bence Bagó, Adam J. Berinsky, David G. Rand","doi":"10.37016/mr-2020-75","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-75","url":null,"abstract":"Do emotions we experience after reading headlines help us discern true from false information or cloud our judgement? Understanding whether emotions are associated with distinguishing truth from fiction and sharing information has implications for interventions designed to curb the spread of misinformation. Among 1,341 Facebook users in Nigeria, we find that emotions—specifically happiness and surprise—are associated with greater belief in and sharing of false, relative to true, COVID-19 headlines. Respondents who are older are more reflective, and do not support the ruling party are better at discerning true from false COVID-19 information.","PeriodicalId":93289,"journal":{"name":"Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69805042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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