Category: fake news

Book Review: How Misinformation Acts Like a Virus

In ‘Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity.’ Sander van der Linden expertly lays out strategies for counteracting misinformation, but also highlights how difficult creating a better information environment…

The focus on misinformation leads to a profound misunderstanding of why people believe and act on bad information

Misinformation has been a prominent paradigm in the explanation of social, political, and more recently epidemiological phenomena since the middle of the last decade. However, Daniel Williams argues that a focus on misinformation is limiting when used …

Mobilising Historical Knowledge without Master Narratives: How historians are correcting the record in a complicated political moment

Across the world and particularly in the USA, historical evidence has become increasingly central to certain contemporary political and policy debates. Drawing on a survey of US media sources, Dustin Hornbeck and Joel Malin, discuss this trend and desc…

The Rule of Truth: How fallacies can help stem the COVID-19 infodemic

Alongside COVID-19 as a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization was quick to declare COVID-19 an infodemic, a superabundance of online and offline information with the potential to undermine public health efforts. Here, Dr. Elinor Carmi, Dr. Myrto Aloumpi and Dr. Elena Musi discuss how philosophical fallacies can be instrumentalised in response to the COVID-19 … Continued

Despite concerns, COVID-19 shows how social media has become an essential tool in the democratisation of knowledge

Social media has played a significant role in mediating the communication of information about COVID-19, although coverage of social media is more often than not negative. In this post, Ronnie Das and Wasim Ahmed, highlight some of the ways in which social media has become essential to societal responses to the crisis and how social … Continued

Between fast science and fake news: Preprint servers are political

Preprints servers have become a vital medium for the rapid sharing of scientific findings. This has been made clear by the speed with which researchers have developed new knowledge about the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this speed and openness has also contributed to the ability of low quality preprints to derail public debate and feed conspiracy … Continued

Don’t Just Debunk Covid-19 Myths. Learn From Them

The spread of Covid-19 across the globe has gone hand in hand with the spread of rumours and myth about the virus. In this repost, Anita Makri, discusses how social science research has played a vital role in responding to previous epidemics and argues that rather seeing Covid-19 myths as a problem of information deficit, they … Continued

Book Review: This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

In This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, Peter Pomerantsev takes readers on a gripping journey through the disinformation age, drawing on his own family history as well as encounters with numerous figures positioned on both sides of the information spectrum: those working to manipulate our perceptions and those engaged in the struggle for a more facts-based public sphere. Ignas Kalpokas highly […]