The Everyday Sharing of Misinformation on Private Social Media project will present early findings at the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference this May. The ICA is the world’s largest and most significant gathering of communication researchers.
Our paper, by Andrew Chadwick, Cristian Vaccari and Natalie-Anne Hall, is entitled What people talk about when they talk about misinformation on private social media. We show how using private social media interacts with people’s everyday experiences, socio-cultural contexts, relationships, and media diets to shape the spread of misinformation. We discuss how these factors contribute to a subtle continuum of emergent norms governing when to challenge misinformation and when to stay silent and let it flow. The paper is based on the first wave of our longitudinal, in-depth qualitative interview fieldwork with 100 participants from London, the East Midlands, and the North East of England, who were recruited to be roughly representative of the UK population on gender, ethnicity, educational attainment, and online media literacy. We will also present preliminary insights based on over 300 multimedia examples of accurate/reliable and inaccurate/unreliable information that participants uploaded via a dedicated mobile app.
This paper will feature as part of an ICA Inter-Divisional Panel organized by Andrew Chadwick: Everyday misinformation and correction on private social media: Relationality, affordances, and emergent norms. The panel, which integrates the ICA Communication & Technology, Journalism Studies, Political Communication, and Mobile Communication Divisions, brings together innovative, multi-method research from India, Singapore, the UK, and the US to illuminate the roles of private platforms and their users in the spread of online misinformation. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will chair the panel. The other papers are by Pranav Malhotra and Katy E. Pearce (University of Washington), Edson Tandoc and Seth Seet (Nanyang Technological University), and Kjerstin Thorson and Ava Francesca Battocchio (Michigan State University).
We look forward to seeing you at ICA 2022!
The Everyday Misinformation Project 