Sharing Facts in a Swarm of Misinformation

Project Goal

Our goal is to help people identify facts more readily so they can stay informed. Ultimately we want to empower our electorate.

Project Overview

Building on our team’s previous misinformation and election dynamics research, this project aims to analyze the level of election-related misinformation during and after the 2022 midterm elections and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention sharing high-quality, non-partisan information on various social media platforms. Using techniques from our previous election research, we collect daily counts of online discussion around certain election-related myths on several social media platforms. Our interventions use best practices for correcting misinformation and use fact-checking websites that have been shown to be fairly non-partisan and reputable. 

 

Our Fact Checkers

The fact-checkers we are using for this project are Politifact, Snopes, AP Fact Check, and FactCheck.org. We have chosen these sites based on their neutrality rating.

 

 

 

 

 Project Team

The research team conducting analysis of the results of this project include Lisa Singh and Leticia Bode from Georgetown University, and Joshua Pasek from the University of Michigan. Georgetown postdoctoral fellows Le Bao and Nathan Wycoff also contributed to this research. Georgetown student researchers supporting this project include Didier Akilimali, Fiona Calcagnini, Yongrui Chen, Justin Goldstein, Kawintiranon Kornraphop, Yaguang Liu, Jenny Park, Rich Pihlstrom, Aidan Pizzo, Hanjing Shi, Sonali Subbu Rathinam, Autumn Toney, Qihang Wang and Yanchen Wang.