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The Unfreedom Monitor: Information

Amsterdam: Global Voices Advox (2022), 22 pp.

"To summarise, three factors define information manipulation today in the observed countries. First, there is continuous enhancement of disinformation technical abilities to overcome the measures taken by IT platforms and make disinformation look more trustworthy, especially using AI. Second, grand ... more

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Addressing Conspiracy Theories: What Teachers Need to Know
Key Guidance

John Cook, Heather Mann, Isabel Tamoj

Paris: UNESCO (2022), 18 pp.

"This document is a first introduction for educators, working in and outside of formal schooling, on how to identify, prevent and address conspiracy theories in education settings. It seeks to provide educators with key definitions and essential knowledge to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon an ... more

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Researching the Evolving Online Ecosystem: Barriers, Methods and Future Challenges

Jakob Guhl, Oliver Marsh, Henry Tuck

London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) (2022), 35 pp.

"This report outlines the findings from the initial scoping phase of a project supported by a grant from Omidyar Network and launched by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and CASM Technology to identify online spaces used by extremist, hate and disinformation actors and communities as they ... more

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Hate Narratives and Disinformation in Online Media in Albania

Ilda Londo

Tirana: South East European Network for Professionalization of Media (SEENPM) (2021), 27 pp.

"The case studies analyzed here show that, in general, the mainstream media does not produce hate speech narratives on its own, but does become a vehicle for carrying them. The greatest producers of hate narratives, division, disinformation, and polarization remain the political actors, partly becau ... more

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The Gender Dimensions of Foreign Influence Operations

Samantha Bradshaw, Amélie Henle

International Journal of Communication, volume 15 (2021), pp. 4596-4618

"Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 7,506 tweets by state-sponsored accounts from Russia’s GRU and the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Iran, and Venezuela, this article examines the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations. By examining the political communication of feminism and women� ... more

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Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Online Disinformation

Ben Kaiser, Jerry Wei, Eli Lucherini, Kevin Kevin Lee, J. Nathan Matias, Jonathan Mayer

USENIX Security Symposium (2021), 18 pp.

"Disinformation is proliferating on the internet, and platforms are responding by attaching warnings to content. There is little evidence, however, that these warnings help users identify or avoid disinformation. In this work, we adapt methods and results from the information security warning litera ... more

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Hashtag Wars: Political Disinformation and Discursive Struggles on Twitter Conversations During the 2018 Brazilian Presidential Campaign

Felipe Bonow Soares, Raquel Recuero

Social Media + Society, volume 7, issue 2 (2021), 13 pp.

"In this article, we analyze the spread of political disinformation in events of discursive struggles on Twitter, during the 2018 presidential election in Brazil. These were disputes for the hegemonic narrative between two stories based on opposed hashtags: one based on news from mainstream media an ... more

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Fake News Misinformation and Hate Speech in Ethiopia: A Vulnerability Assessment

Brussels: European Institute of Peace (2021), 22 pp.

"The assessment found that Ethiopia's media ecosystem's weaknesses have made it vulnerable to fake news, misinformation, and hate speech. Some of the driving factors are undoubtedly historical, including the weak state of private media in Ethiopia, the critical role of the Ethiopian diaspora in medi ... more

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Why Conspirational Propaganda Works and What We Can Do About It: Audience Vulnerability and Resistance to Anti-Western, Pro-Kremlin Disinformation in Ukraine

Peter Pomerantsev et al.

London School of Economics and Political Science; Internews Ukraine; Cardiff University, Crime and Security Research Institute (2021), 45 pp.

"The most effective propaganda resonates with audiences’ underlying worldviews and personal experiences. In order to fight it, one has to understand the mindsets that it preys on. This paper sets out to do exactly that. We first track a set of Kremlin-aligned propaganda narratives across Ukrainian ... more

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Ill Advice: A Case Study in Facebook’s Failure to Tackle COVID-19 Disinformation

Aoife Gallagher, Macckenzie Hart, Ciarán O'Connor

London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) (2021), 34 pp.

"Despite detailed policies on mis- and disinformation and promises to enforce them, social media platforms are failing to tackle prominent groups and individuals who spread false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines online. Using the World Doctors Alliance1 as a case study, a group that has spread var ... ious problematic, false and conspiratorial claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, ISD found that 78% of the group’s 1.2 million online followers are found on mainstream platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok) who claim to prohibit this kind of content. The Facebook pages of World Doctors Alliance members have a following of over 550,000 users, which increased by 13,215% between January 2020 and July 2021. Videos posted by these Facebook pages have been viewed more than 21.1 million times. These pages have accumulated a total of 5.77 million interactions since January 2020, with interaction rates increasing by 85% in the first six months of 2021 compared to the previous six months. Facebook posts mentioning the World Doctors Alliance or its members have attracted more than three million engagements on Facebook and are present in at least 46 different languages on the platform. ISD found that large proportions—often the majority—of the most engaged with content on Facebook mentioning the World Doctors Alliance or its members in English, Spanish, German and Arabic contained false, misleading or conspiratorial claims related to COVID-19 and vaccines. Organisations that are part of Facebook’s fact-checking program have debunked false claims made by the World Doctors Alliance 189 times since the beginning of the pandemic. Despite this extensive fact-checking effort, Facebook is failing to take decisive action on the group or its members. Facebook’s fact-checking program incorporates organisations from 115 countries, but there appear to be major gaps in fact-checking in non-English languages. ISD found minimal application of fact-checking labels across the four languages analysed, with lower application rates on posts in German, Spanish and Arabic than in English. Content that does contain fact-checking labels is still accumulating tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of engagements." (Key findings) more

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How Information Disorder Affirms Authoritarianism and Destabilizes Democracy: Evidence, Trends, and Actionable Mitigation Strategies from Asia and the Pacific

Michael Buehler, Ed Schatz, Sameen Ali, Christopher Green, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri

Washington, DC: USAID; Integra Government Services International LLC; Asia Emerging Opportunities (AEO) Activity (2021), 130 pp.

"Section 2 of this report provides an overview of information disorder in Asia and the Pacific and describes how it destabilizes democracy and strengthens authoritarianism. After situating information disorder in Asia and the Pacific in its historical context, Section 2 examines which actors 1) spre ... more

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Persuasive strategies in online health misinformation: A systematic review

Wei Peng, Sue Lim, Jingbo Meng

Information, Communication & Society, volume 26, issue 11 (2021), pp. 2131-2148

"A proliferation of a variety of health misinformation is present online, particularly during times of public health crisis. To combat online health misinformation, numerous studies have been conducted to taxonomize health misinformation or examine debunking strategies for various types of health mi ... more

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Understanding the Context Around Content: Looking Behind Misinformation Narratives

Laura Livingston

Global Insights, issue December (2021), pp. 16-22

"Misinformation is not solely an online problem; offline dynamics and activities also contribute to misinformation’s spread and resonance. - Political conflict, social upheaval, economic stress, and other sociological or psychological are among the offline dynamics that contribute to misinformatio ... more

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Harmful Information: Misinformation, Disinformation and Hate Speech in Armed Conflict and Other Situations of Violence. ICRC Initial Findings and Perspectives on Adapting Protection Approaches

Delphine van Solinge, Mark Silverman et al.

Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2021), 20 pp.

"The present document .. first proposes a working definition of what misinformation, disinformation and hate speech” (MDH) are and how they can be framed conceptually. It then explains why MDH is of such significant concern to the ICRC and the wider humanitarian sector. Next, it outlines the key c ... more

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How Journalists Can Address Misinformation on Telegram

Bermet Talant

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2021), 35 pp.

"As of July 2021, Telegram had 550 million active users worldwide – more than the individual user bases of Twitter, Snapchat or Discord. It is the fifth most-popular messaging app after Facebook-owned Whatsapp and Messenger, and WeChat and QQ which dominate the Chinese market [...] For this paper, ... more

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Policy Papers: Perspectives on Gendered Disinformation

Digital Rights Foundation (DRF); Heinrich Böll Stiftung (2021), 85 pp.

"Through these mediations on gendered disinformation, and the variety of perspectives that the authors bring, we call into question hegemonic structures of knowledge production. The anthology forces us to call into question the very idea of objectivity, blurring lines between 'truth' and 'lies'. The ... more

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Disinformation in Iraqi Media

Aida Al-Kaisy

London: LSE Middle East Centre; Conflict Research Programme (CRP) (2021), 21 pp.

"This paper examines the key narratives of disinformation that are prevalent in Iraqi media. It provides an analysis of the messages, agents, intentions and impact of the spread of disinformation. Focusing particularly on the period during which planned national elections were postponed, it identifi ... more

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Motivations for Sharing Misinformation: A Comparative Study in Six Sub-Saharan African Countries

Dani Madrid-Morales, Herman Wasserman, Gregory Gondwe et al.

International Journal of Communication, volume 15 (2021), pp. 1200-1219

"In most African countries, “fake news,” politically motivated disinformation, and misinformation in the media were common occurrences before these became a preoccupation in the Global North. However, with a fast-growing population of mobile users, and the popularization of apps such as WhatsApp ... more

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Social Media and the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Dilemma of Fake News Clutter Vs. Social Responsibility

Moez Ben Messaoud

Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, volume 14, issue 1 (2021), pp. 25-45

"This article examines the relationship between fake news and social media as increasingly important sources of news, at a time when mainstream media no longer have exclusive control over news production and dissemination. It has been evident that few media outlets and professionals tend to draw con ... flicting news about COVID-19 from social media feeds, which are largely produced by common citizens with mostly no journalism training. This pervasive use makes social media key sources to scores of media outlets for news, whether it is related to COVID-19 or public affairs issues, even though it is susceptible to torrents of credibility and accuracy issues. As a result, of the overwhelming spread of fake news on coronavirus, which is contributing to framing events from several angles, media professionals are now obliged to track and vet information circulating on social media. Due to the scale of disinformation spreading on the Web, it has become imperative that the credibility and accuracy of news is thoroughly verified. Media organizations have already been putting in place various mechanisms to monitor false news. This article will attempt to identify and assess these monitoring efforts in the Arab world. For this purpose, I have put together a list of Arab observatories launched on the internet in order to monitor fake news circulating in relation to COVID-19, and to discuss their methods of monitoring work, in the context of mobilization carried out by governments and many organizations such as the World Health Organization. This article is pinned down on social responsibility approach which helps pave the way the differentpropositions to combat fake news and avoid abuses in social media uses. This article proposes an evaluation of the monitoring initiative viaa- vis fake news and proposes a set of guidelines for improving the work of such monitoring bodies. Hence, this research reveals that social media outlets have diversified their goals to match the power of the conventional media in disseminating information and bringing up issues for debate. However, in the light of the framework of social responsibility, social media actors have to constantly develop a set of ethical practices to be observed by users, establish codes of conduct regulating content production, and lay down a code of integrity to assure accuracy in news and information transmission." (Abstract). more

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Fighting Fake News: A Study of Online Misinformation Regulation in the Asia Pacific

Andrea Carson

Melbourne: La Trobe University (2021), xvi, 117 pp.

Addressing Conspiracy Theories: What Teachers Need to Know Key Guidance

Addressing Conspiracy Theories: What Teachers Need to Know
Key Guidance