Earlier this week we published a new public report from the Everyday Misinformation Project. Misinformation on Personal Messaging—Are WhatsApp's Warnings Effective? provides new, population-level findings that confirm and expand the exploratory findings in our June 2023 report, Beyond Quick Fixes: How Users Make Sense of Misinformation Warnings on Personal Messaging. The evidence we present this week comes from our nationally-representative survey of 2,000 members of the public. These new data allow us to generalise for the first time about how those among the UK public who use personal ..read more

“While adopting and adapting digital technologies propels the state, market, and public into an immersive digital sphere, such endeavor also paradoxically impedes the region’s momentum for substantial change, perpetuating a state of stasis.” The advent of the digital era has ushered in an unprecedented wave of transformation across the global landscape. Its pervasive influence has permeated nearly every facet of human existence, altering societal norms, economic structures, and political paradigms. However, this profound impact has not been uniform, and its manifestations differ significantly ..read more

Hot off the press… the latest publication from the Everyday Misinformation Project, out now in Media, Culture & Society. Dr Natalie-Anne Hall took the lead on this latest article. The Challenge Most research into online misinformation has investigated its direct effects—the impact it may have on citizens’ beliefs and behaviour. Much less attention has been paid to how citizens themselves make sense of misinformation as a broader social problem. Such attitudes are likely to shape how people respond to anti-misinformation interventions, so it is worth paying attention to them. What We Did I ..read more

“The collectivity of internet users who have been able to enhance their informational or communicative power online are what I call the ‘Fifth Estate.’ This, I argue, is the power shift of the digital age.” On the 9th of June 2023, the climate activist Greta Thunberg announced the end of her school strikes for climate. It was five years before, in 2018, when Greta was 15 years old, that she began skipping classes to protest outside the Swedish Parliament for politicians to act on climate change. She held a sign that now famously read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (School strike for climate). A ph ..read more

Out now in New Media & Society This is the latest research article from the Everyday Misinformation Project that I’m leading. The project, which is funded by the Leverhulme trust, began in April 2021 and runs until March 2024. For this piece, we explored a previously-unexamined practice our fieldwork uncovered: when users create “group rules” to prevent misinformation entering their everyday interactions. Personal messaging platforms are hugely popular but not well understood WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users around the world. In the United Kingdom, more than 60% of the adult populat ..read more

Photo: @S_Soroka Smartphones are ubiquitous today. People increasingly rely on their mobile devices for many tasks, including news consumption. Most North Americans and Europeans cannot imagine life without a mobile phone; a majority report rarely being without one. Globally, smartphones are now the primary source of access to the internet for many. In this way, mobile devices are expanding access to news and political information. And yet, growing evidence from several fields highlights the limitations of mobile formats for information seeking and processing. In our new book News and Democra ..read more

Cristian Vaccari, Johannes Kaiser, and I have a new study out in the journal Political Communication: Vaccari, C., Chadwick, A., & Kaiser, J. (2022). The Campaign Disinformation Divide: Believing and Sharing News in the 2019 UK General Election. Political Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2128948 During the 2019 UK general election campaign (an unusually important one, known as the “Brexit election”) we were lucky enough to be able to add some of our own customized questions (free of charge) into Opinium’s omnibus election tracker survey, across two waves—around the mid ..read more

Large technology companies such as Facebook and Google – in competition with a few others including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft , and a handful of other companies elsewhere – increasingly define the way the internet works and thereby influence the structure of the entire digital media environment. But how do they exercise this power, how have news organisations responded, and what does this development mean for the production and circulation of news? These are the questions we focus on in our new book. Our primary objective is to understand the relationship between publishers and platforms ..read more

“The era of perpetual presidential impeachment is probably upon us.” So wrote a Washington Post reporter in August 2021 in response to U.S. Republican lawmakers’ calls for the impeachment of President Joe Biden over the handling of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In September 2021, a group of Republican lawmakers did indeed file articles of impeachment against Biden over the issues of Afghanistan withdrawal and a migrant surge at the U.S. border. In democratic countries, demands for presidential impeachments by opposition parties or citizens tend to happen during major economic or diplomati ..read more

The internet, it seems, is broken beyond repair. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are helping to exacerbate racial biases, spread disinformation, amplify hate, and radicalize ideological thinking. Social media are, in other words, “undermining democracy.” Often forgotten, it seems, is that social media are also here to stay. Facebook has almost 3 billion monthly active users—a population larger than China and India combined. And public officials often take to platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram  to voice th ..read more