The Palgrave Handbook of Media Misinformation

In 2021, the term infodemic was coined to describe the state of misinformation about health and science that has the potential to undermine public health initiatives and endanger lives. The current infodemic, this essay argues, emerges in a digital culture that exacerbates three phenomena: distributed propaganda, the hollowing of local media ecosystems, and rampant media cynicism. This chapter uses these phenomena to introduce the concept of “civic distance.” Civic distance here reflects the increasing space between our media lives and the human interactions necessary for meaningful engagement in civic life. The comparison to the automobile is made to reinforce the impacts of “distance” on our interactions with others.

Our contemporary information ecosystems seem increasingly disordered. Driven by mass media outlets with little allegiance to facts, and decontextualised by social media platforms, we often turn to familiar narratives to help make sense of the world. To understand how those narratives affect what we know and how we learn, Global Voices has developed a research and digital literacy method called the Civic Media Observatory. This chapter is drawn from a talk given by the Executive Director of Global Voices, Ivan Sigal, in which he describes how this approach can develop the contextual knowledge required to understand, assess and respond to emerging events around the world.

This chapter questions whether the big tech giants, such as Facebook and Twitter, are breaching freedom of expression by regulating and blocking content on their platforms. Does this amount to self-regulatory censorship by enforcing their own rules and ‘by-laws’ on their users? Are they right to ban the promotion of self-harm, suicide, bullying and incitement to racial hatred? The Facebook Oversight Board is assessed and the meaning of media plurality is explored as well as re-examining fake news and disinformation on social media platforms. Legislative steps taken by the EU Commission and the UK Government in relation to ‘online harms and safety’ end the discussion, asking whether it is possible to legislate the internet or whether the big social media tech giants should self-regulate content on their platforms?

Civic engagement, power and information are closely connected. Teenagers care about the world and want to act to cure inequalities and injustice, but usually function within family, school or online environments. Consecutive lockdowns in the pandemic dramatically reduced the social spaces of Greek teenagers; so, screens were their main communication and expression channel. Even before the pandemic, social networks were teens’ preferred information source, yet due to the lack of suitable information structures, they can grow in a vacuum of meaningful content about how society is organised or how to get involved. Today’s teens are the voters and decision makers of tomorrow: Are they empowered to get civically engaged? Can they spontaneously become news literate or should they be educated to sort truth from fiction?

This chapter analyses the role played by disinformation disseminated through social networks in the plebiscite campaign against the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia. Twenty-eight accounts with a base of 761,017 tweets were analysed using sentimental and multimodal analysis. The traditional forms of propaganda and manipulation that prevailed in analogue media have been adapted to digital media, with the aggravating factor that they have greater penetration and less control. The social media Twitter played a central role in promoting disinformation that ultimately favoured the NO vote in the peace plebiscite. After more than half a century of war, an important part of the citizenry made the fundamental decision to reject the peace agreement by the hand of disinformation.

This chapter proposes a critical methodological approach to misinformation and offers creative strategies to confront deviation or manipulation in different moments of the communication process. It draws on the author’s experience as a documentary artist and combines theoretical and practical insights in the imagining of alternative models for understanding and narrating historical events. The author uses his own films, installations and interactive projects as examples of critical media making as a way of resisting misinformation.

The incoherent legend of an aspirational, all-conquering, white masculinity is perpetually born and reborn, leading an alt-right movement yet also chasing its meandering development, all whilst never really existing at all. A ghostly presence, sensed but not seen, pieced together via memes and chat rooms and backyard-brawl videos and marches and speeches and Championship Fights and Super Bowls. The spectre of an idealised, performative masculinity, itself set within an increasingly complex and fiercely defended fantasia, haunts the browsing history of the west. He’s gone before his essence can be captured but his myth continually shapeshifts and builds. The Capitol Hill riot was as much protest as it was a mass audition; individual contestants making their claim to represent and embody the spectre of uber-masculine spectacle.

While the field of professional fact-checking has grown steadily in Hong Kong as a countermeasure to tackle misinformation, concerns over politicisation and misappropriation of this practice have also become salient. Investigation of widely shared information in public, particularly political statements, could be a delicate affair in the Special Administrative Region of China. Despite the challenges, many stakeholders—from media organisations to community groups to governmental authorities—engage in fact-checking constantly while educators have also incorporated it into media literacy programmes. In this chapter, the author explores the historical development of fact-checking amid political upheavals and discusses its impact and implications on the news industry and educational sectors in Hong Kong.

All around the world, people encountered a variety of different types of informative and persuasive messages about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that helped them make wise decisions about their health behavior or that hindered the quality of their decision making. We use content analysis of a sample of 88 coronavirus propaganda artifacts available on the Mind Over Media platform, identifying how it appeals to audience needs and values, activates emotions, attacks opponents, and simplifies ideas and information. The use of crowdsourced online content for media literacy education may ensure that classroom discussions are relevant to the zeitgeist of the times, and it also offers learners and teachers the opportunity for comparative examination and analysis of media content curated from their peers from around the world.

Implementing public relations tactics of the chemical and tobacco industries, fossil fuel companies (Big Carbon) leverage dark money networks, right-wing media, and conservative think tanks to manufacture doubt about climate science. Discourses of science denial and solutions delay undermine scholars, academics, civil society, and governing bodies seeking to address the climate crisis. By design, conspiracy theories destabilise a coherent climate solutions narrative. This contributes to a larger “epistemic crisis” of untruth and political polarisation. The outcome of Big Carbon’s widespread climate disinformation is reduced climate literacy, which requires a systems-wide response to solve the climate crisis. This chapter maps the network of “fake climate news” and how it maintains a climate crisis “denial space.”

This chapter examines user-generated interventions in dealing with health misinformation using disparagement humour. It focuses on the shuanghuanglian (SHL) oral liquid incident in China that emerged in early 2020. SHL oral liquid, among all medicines rumoured to be effective in curing the novel COVID-19 virus, was the only one that triggered panic-buying among the Chinese public. It started the interventions from Weibo users who did not believe in the rumour to correct rumour endorsers. The former used disparagement humour to ridicule rumour endorsers in undifferentiated and unreasonable medicine consumption, unquestioning panic-buying, lack of common sense, and mental issues. While the interventions intended to force the change of misperceptions and to stop the panic and anxiety caused by the panic-buying, its effectiveness was questioned.

Dis-/mis-/mal-information are a cause for growing concerns across the world and scholars have been discussing the spread of misinformation around such things as elections, COVID-19 or the climate crisis. They have documented how people across the world are effectively bombarded with misleading messages through various media from social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok), private messaging apps (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat) and broadcast media. This raises the question of how citizens can respond to this? What resources (social, cultural and material) can they draw upon to identify, evaluate and respond to mis-information? This chapter focuses on this question by exploring citizens’ digital and data literacies, especially the social networks (personal and digital) that citizens depend on for support.

Calls to teach media literacy to counter misinformation have grown worldwide since the political upheavals in the United Kingdom and United States in 2016. Programmes teaching elements of media and information literacy, news literacy and digital literacy have expanded in many countries and calls for their introduction have been widespread around the world. While existing literature does show that teaching of broad media literacy can provide “positive effects” for students, current research provides limited evidence that traditional media literacy substantially reduces susceptibility to misinformation. Based on an examination of misinformation and a theorisation of news literacy put forward in 2020, I propose a theory of misinformation literacy grounded in knowledge and skills of six key aspects of mis/disinformation: context, content, creation, circulation, consumption and consequences.

With increased access to internet and mobile phones in Nepal, India and Myanmar, dissemination of misinformation has occurred as a major problem. This chapter investigates the various instances of misinformation being used in this region and its harrowing results. It defines misinformation is not a new phenomenon in South and Southeast Asia. It also delves into the approach BBC Media Action is currently employing in the fight against misinformation. The chapter further discusses the possible ways to combat this issue in various levels—through state mechanisms, media and development agencies.

This chapter argues that different journalisms emerge at different times to serve the ideology of the age. Contemporary journalism (Official Journalism) is largely the product of the Boomer generation, its values and ideals. Hence the early twenty-first century is a period of flux due to demographic change as the Boomers fade from the scene. Drawing on generational cohort theory, this chapter describes how, as the Boomer Ideology is challenged by disruptive, new forces, we witness the rise of a new journalism (Unofficial Journalism). The war between them signals a wider epistemic struggle to define the nature of reality, truth and misinformation.

This chapter is re-published from the book UnPresidented , by Jon Sopel (2021), former North America editor of the BBC. It offers an analysis of events following Donald Trump’s failure to secure re-election as president in 2020, when he refused to acknowledge his Democrat opponent Joe Biden’s victory. The days and months following the election were hallmarked by conspiracy theory, alternative versions of the truth, threat, allegations of ‘election interference’ and legal challenges. This culminated in the extraordinary events of 6 January 202, when Trump urged his supporters to descend on Washington to ‘stop the steal’: Sopel offers an eye-witness account of the ‘dark, wild’ hours of the Capitol riots and assesses the fragile state of American democracy in the wake of the Trump presidency. The chapter concludes with personal reflections on Trump’s relationship with the media, his use and abuse—of social media and considers whether Trump’s ‘vice-like grip’ on the Republican party signifies the potential for his return to mainstream politics.

Agenda-setting theory holds that news media can shape what its audiences think about, and that certain vulnerable communities are more exposed than the rest of society. There is growing evidence that the same, unequal agenda-setting power applies to so-called fake news, but relatively little is known about the work being done to combat these harms. This chapter reviews literature examining the impact of mis-, dis- and mal-information on different user groups and sets it against analysis of educational media literacy projects in the UK. We argue that these vulnerable communities most at risk of the agenda-setting power of ‘fake news’ struggle to access meaningful information to help them navigate the online world. This is in part due to a fragmented and poorly funded media literacy sector.

The ability for journalists to produce work for and connect with their audiences through social media has blurred boundaries around professional journalism. Research has considered questions of who or what is a journalist in this new environment, who comprises the audience, and social media’s influence on relationships between journalists and audiences. In this messy media environment, in which professional journalists compete with everyday users—some with bad intentions—to produce and circulate news, issues of trust and credibility have become so pervasive that scholars and pundits alike have raised the alarm. Several organisations are working to rebuild audiences’ trust in news and journalists: they are leveraging the same social media tools and platforms that have played a role in the diminishment of trust in journalism.

Images dominate today’s media landscape, facilitated by the digital technologies that provide both the tools to take and store them and distribution platforms. For mainstream news reporting, the unprecedented volume of user-generated images and video allows the global public to witness events otherwise inaccessible. But the technology to manipulate digital images—and generate fake ones—has far outpaced journalists’ abilities to detect the falsifications. This chapter looks at the types of fake images in circulation and outlines the methods being deployed to generate and tackle them, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep neural networks. It also highlights how misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes have destabilised democracies, and challenges readers with the necessity of finding ways to counter these rising threats to society.

This chapter explores the ways in which Boubli, a Tunisian youth-led media project, has addressed information disorder in what may seem unconventional and rather indirect ways which are consonant with civic media literacy and practice and hold the promise of deep, yet non-obvious, effects on key drivers such as polarisation and homophily. Boubli’s mission is to empower young people, especially the most marginalised, to disrupt the media landscape and to challenge dominant narratives and stereotypical representations of youth through innovative content. This chapter argues that although it was born out of a visceral desire to carve a space for young people in the Tunisian mediascape, rather than a theoretically grounded vision, Boubli remarkably fits the value system for civic media literacy.

This case study explores student learning on the South Island School Agence France Presse Digital Media course. Examples of the pedagogy used by South Island AFP Media teachers have been explored including a focus on fact-checking skills informed using authentic examples provided via the expertise of news journalists working in Hong Kong. The application of student learning in the use of fact-checking tools such as Trust Servista and Tin Eye is presented through analysis of the video essays submitted as summative tasks in this unit. Although the critical thinking skills required to complete this task remain extremely challenging for fourteen- to fifteen-year-old students, most successfully harness the tools offered to identify some examples of misinformation in the news stories they select to explore.

This chapter presents the results of the SMaRT-EU intergenerational research project, by discussing disinformation and clickbait through participatory workshops to actively engage participants in these subjects and apprehend their voices. The results are based on the Portuguese sample. The team conducted nine workshops between May and June 2021 and two in September and in November (by request of one of the groups). The data suggests that age is an important factor; for instance, there are digital challenges specific to older people, particularly those aged over 70 and 90. We could also identify educational-related variances among the workshop groups. The group with higher education revealed dense previous knowledge and also skills to add valuable content to the workshop sessions.

This chapter aims to clarify how Sati (mindfulness) can be combined with the concept of digital media literacy to enlarge the new approach of self-literacy and investigate and understand an individual’s patterns of habituation in daily life. Sati (mindfulness) is the core component of digital media literacy. It enables individuals to develop competencies in which they can observe their own automatic responses based on their experiences that cultivate their own perceptions, beliefs and myths. Individuals can clarify their real problems with regards to the familiarity of cultural background. Particularly, how to glocalise Sati (mindfulness) into the universal concept of digital media literacy for redefining and reframing digital media literacy in ‘diverse approaches’ to monitor all media messages that they consume before misinformation goes viral.

Media literacy in the time of Covid is situated at an intersection between its value as an educational inoculation against misinformation in general and the urgency of a rapid response to misinformation about the virus. Media literacy in this context takes on a role in public health. This chapter offers a meta review of the evidence for the effectiveness of media literacy in the context of the global pandemic, evaluating reviews conducted for the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), European Commission, US Embassy and UK Office of Communications (OFCOM), together with an original analysis of media literacy initiatives designed as a response to misinformation about coronavirus.