Misinformation

Social media includes the practice of both creating user-generated content and sharing and curating material created by others.  As the editors of How the World Changed Social Media (2016) write, it is the content of social media that “is most significant when it comes to why social media matters,” not the platforms on which it appears.  At the same time, as this recent article on social media platforms and the spread of misinformation argues, the incentive structure of social media platforms of “likes” and “shares” creates social rewards that are disassociated from the veracity of the content being liked or shared. This creates a complex ethical environment for the creative practices of social media content creation for everyone using social media, whether journalists, activists, or individuals using social media in their personal and professional lives. These resouces examine issues of responsible creation, evaluating and sharing, and verification.
 

Guides

• To Post or Not to Post: How Journalists Can Best Use Social Media As a recent Pew Research Center study cited in this article reports, more than 94% of journalists and editors use social media to connect with their audiences and promote their stories. This article presents advice about how to use social media in these ways and how to balance its professional and personal use.
• Overlays: How journalists can avoid amplifying misinformation in their stories This guide explains how overlays - visual filters that are placed over images that contain misinformation - can be used by journalists to prevent the amplification and spread of misinformation.
• “Investigating Actors and Content” in Verification Handbook For Disinformation And Media Manipulation Edited by Craig Silverman. This chapter, which includes three case studies, examines issues such as how to monitor for fakes in the context of breaking news, investigating social media accounts, and spotting inauthentic activity on social media.

Articles

• Ceylan, G., Anderson, I. A., & Wood, W. (2023). "Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(4), e2216614120. This research shows that the structure of online sharing built into social media platforms is more important than either partisan bias or individuals’ critical reasoning in the spread of misinformation. Habits formed by the rewards-based drivers of social media, this research demonstrates, actually discourage users from considering whether or not they are spreading misinformation.
• Cho, H., Cannon, J., Lopez, R., & Li, W. (2024). "Social media literacy: A conceptual framework." New Media & Society, 26(2), 941-960. This article introduces the conceptual framework of social media literacy to analyze how individuals create social media reality construction.  It argues for the importance of this framework in understanding and analyzing individuals’ role in creating and spreading misinformation.

Books