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...
The far right is acting as one party. When will we? | Euractiv
Liberal institutions treat each surge of populism as a domestic challenge to be managed within national elections or courts. Meanwhile the far right amplifies each other’s victories, recycles each other’s talking points, and shares disinformation
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.
Venezuela misinformation spreads like wildfire online
The right clearly get that people aren't happy about what Trump did in Venezuela. So, they're pumping out misinformation and AI slop
A quote by Garry Kasparov
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Verification, Deliberation, Accountability: A new framework for tackling epistemic collapse and renewing democracy
Demos is Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank. We produce original research, publish innovative thinkers and host thought-provoking events.
Brazil Has A Plan To Combat The Right Wing's Unreality
Brazil's government is trying something weird: Being proactive about election misinformation.
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.
Election Disinformation in Different Languages is a Big Problem in the U.S.
And it’s driving a wedge between voters in non-English communities Mis- and disinformation about elections predate the endless scroll of modern social media services. [1] Yet easy access to online information channels and amplification tools enable false narratives to spread at a massive scale. When false narratives are combined with data voids and unique cultural […]
Left & Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction
This book brings together for the first time an updated, revised collection of influential essays and articles that capture some of the most exciting scientific and scholarly contributions to the topic ...
The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant
Abstract. Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status compet
The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant
Abstract. Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status compet
German political parties leave X, say platform “descended into chaos”
Three German left-wing parties have announced a coordinated departure from the social media platform X, saying it has descended into chaos and promotes right-wing populist content.
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....
Capturing our Attention
What are the harms of misinformation? It’s widely believed that it causes false belief, including false beliefs in quite bizarre claims. I argue that this threat is greatly exaggerated: while plaus...
We're getting the social media crisis wrong
The bigger problem isn't disinformation. It's degraded democratic publics
🧵 Democracy feels like it's in a rough state at the moment across the globe, and we hear various explanations, like polarisation, extremism, disinformation, and loss of trust. But what if those explanations are mainly symptoms and we've been trying to treat them rather than the underlying causes?
