About the Project

Overview

Based in the Online Civic Culture Centre and the Department of Communication and Media at Loughborough University, the Everyday Misinformation Project was a three-year study funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project’s aim was to develop better-contextualised understanding of why people share and correct misinformation online.

The project had a unique focus on personal messaging, or what are sometimes called private social media or encrypted messaging apps. These services, particularly WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, are hugely popular in the UK, but their role in the spread of misinformation is not well understood. In part, this is because, due to their nature, these services are difficult to research. Unlike public social media, they do not have public online archives and they feature end-to-end encryption.

Crucially, however, communication on personal messaging is never entirely defined by its privacy. Rather, we think these services are best understood as hybrid public-interpersonal communication environments. They weave constant, often emotionally intimate connection into the fabric of everyday life and are used mainly to maintain relationships with strong ties, such as family, friends, parents, co-workers, and local communities. Yet often the information shared on these services comes from media and information sources in the public worlds of news, politics, science, and entertainment, before it then cascades across private groups, often losing markers of provenance along the way. Personal messaging involves private, interpersonal, and semi-public communication in a variety of subtle, complex, and constantly shifting ways. Understanding how this shapes the spread and the correction of misinformation requires sensitivity to unique affordances and patterns of use. This was our project.

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Funding for the Everyday Misinformation Project was applied for in May 2019 and received in March 2020. Following a delay due to the Covid pandemic, work began in March 2021. The Principal Investigator was Professor Andrew Chadwick, the Co-Investigator was Professor Cristian Vaccari. Dr Natalie-Anne Hall, Dr Brendan Lawson, and Dr Portia Akolgo were the Postdoctoral Research Associates.

The fieldwork had three strands:

—Longitudinal, two-wave, in-depth qualitative interviews (W1 N=102, W 2 N=80) with members of the public based in three regions of the UK, recruited to roughly reflect the diversity of British society in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, educational attainment, and a basic indicator of digital literacy.
—Analysis of personal messaging content the qualitative interview participants voluntarily uploaded to personal online diaries via a mobile smartphone app.
—A two-wave, nationally representative panel survey (W1 N=2,000, W2 N=1,200), and a nationally representative survey experiment (N=2,580), designed based on findings from the first two strands of fieldwork.