The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?

This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians "crying wolf"' over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the "liar's dividend," may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters. We administer five survey experiments to over 15,000 American adults detailing hypothetical politician responses to stories describing real politician scandals. We find that claims of misinformation representing both strategies raise politician support across partisan subgroups. These strategies are effective against text-based reports of scandals, but are largely ineffective against video evidence and do not reduce general trust in media. Finally, these false claims produce greater dividends for politicians than alternative responses to scandal, such as remaining silent or apologizing.

Deepfakes, Elections, and Shrinking the Liar’s Dividend

Heightened public awareness of the power of generative AI could give politicians an incentive to lie about the authenticity of real content.

When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries - Petter Törnberg, Juliana Chueri, 2026

The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of mi...

When everything is news, nothing is news

Thoughtlessly repeating PR talking points and sharing guesswork as rumor is creating a trust problem.

How to Responsibly Report on Hacks and Disinformation

The run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election illustrated how vulnerable our most venerated journalistic outlets are to a new kind of information warfare. Reporters are a targeted adversary of foreign and domestic actors who want to harm our democracy. And to cope with this threat, especially in an election year, news organizations need to prepare for another wave of false, misleading, and hacked information. Often, the information will be newsworthy. Expecting reporters to refrain from covering news goes against core principles of American journalism and the practical business drivers that shape the intensely competitive media marketplace. In these cases, the question is not whether to report but how to do so most responsibly. Our goal is to give journalists actionable guidance.

Disinformation and grievance narratives

Synthese - Disinformation is often defined as misleading content intended to instill false beliefs. But this definition is too narrow. We need to focus instead on its broader epistemic effects....

Nothing to Declare

Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such things in the […]

📣 Take Action: Reform Section 702: End mass warrantless surveillance

Make an impact with guided actions from Freedom of The Press Foundation.

On Bullshit

Over one million copies sold worldwideThe international and #1 New York Times bestsellerThe anniversary edition of the acclaimed book that reveals why bullshit is more dangerous than lying

Deep Storytelling: Collective Sensemaking and Layers of Meaning in U.S. Elections

Misinformation and disinformation about elections remain pressing concerns for researchers, policymakers, and the public. Critics, however, argue that fears surrounding these issues are exaggerated due to a lack of evidence of impact. This debate highlights the challenges inherent in assessing the impacts of misinformation, as the drivers of false and misleading content often exist in the context of a specific claim. To address this issue, we examined false and misleading information surrounding the 2020 and 2022 U.S. national elections, focusing on the contextual features of online conversations that fueled various rumors. We developed two qualitative codebooks, creating the second after realizing that the first, which labeled individual tweets, failed to capture broader rumoring dynamics. By integrating multi-layered qualitative coding with thematic analysis and quantitative visualizations, we show how influencers, political elites, and audiences collaboratively told deep stories from 2020 through 2022. As these stories were told, audiences interpreted events in 2022 through the lens of the 2020 story, guided by influencers' cues, leading to an evolution in storytelling style between the two election cycles. This ongoing performance was tailored to align with the incentive structures, affordances, and attention economy of social media. We combine deep stories with theories of collective sensemaking and rumoring, creating a framework to better assess the contextual features surrounding false and misleading information.

Andreas De Block on Twitter / X

It took Nature three years to publish this rebuttal, which clearly demonstrates the fundamental flaws in the original paper. In the meantime, the paper's conclusions influenced scientific debate and policy decisions. Such delays in correcting flawed research do real damage. https://t.co/QI3Ei3PE70— Andreas De Block (@DeblockBlock) August 13, 2026

The Human Cost of DOGE’s War on U.S.A.I.D.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the “public man-made death” that they’ve caused.

DOGE Dunces, Depositions, DC Cops and Scoop Ethics (Half the Answer #73, with Marisa Kabas)

DC cops assisted the DOGE boys in breaking into the United States Institute of Peace office in March 2025—and now journalist Marisa Kabas of the Handbasket has obtained their body cam footage from that day. She tells Trent and Caitlin how she did it, and they discuss the total

Fact-Checking False Claims about our Gender Identity Coverage | The New York Times Company

A recent post from Trans News Network included numerous falsehoods about New York Times stories on gender identity and maligned some of the journalists involved in the work. Our coverage is guided by…

Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning

Researchers discovered that people found AI impersonators to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real politicians, raising alarm bells around the potential for public deception.