We all know someone who will not change their mind, no matter what evidence you show them. This article explains why—and why the problem is structural, not personal. Our minds filter information through a sequence of checkpoints that determines what we accept as true, and when. Once misinformation passes through those gates, correcting it becomes extraordinarily hard. This article maps that filter, names its three key components, and shows how understanding it could transform the way public communicators fight false beliefs. Drawing on linguistics, communication theory, and the social psychology of belief, it offers a cross-disciplinary framework that sits squarely within the humanities’ long engagement with language, persuasion, and the formation of public knowledge. The implications reach beyond academic study: policymakers, educators, journalists, and anyone responsible for communicating in conditions of public uncertainty will find here a practical account of why the usual tools of correction so often fail—and what a better-designed approach would look like. At a moment when the spread of false belief is among the most pressing challenges in public life, the humanities have a distinctive contribution to make—and this framework is an attempt to make it.

Debriefings are a cornerstone of ethical research, especially when deception is used. In misinformation experiments, debriefings both disclose the deception and warn participants about misinformation. Unlike other misinformation interventions, they reveal that researchers deliberately introduced the falsehoods, raising concerns about trust and skepticism. In a preregistered U.S. experiment (N = 896), we compare no debriefing, a general debriefing, and a specific debriefing with fact-checks and source links. Only the specific debriefing reduced belief in false claims participants saw, not in novel ones. The general debriefing slightly reduced belief in true news, suggesting warnings may heighten skepticism. Both improved attitudes toward the study and perceived transparency, supporting the use of specific debriefings as an ethical and effective practice in misinformation research.

Most research on social media considers them as supports for information transmission, explaining online success (and pathologies) by focusing on consumers’ biases and interests. This article takes a different perspective, applying ideas from an ecological approach to culture. Success online depends both on the intrinsic appeal of content to receivers and on how well content serves producers’ strategic goals within the constraints and affordances of specific platforms. These goals include reputation management, coalition building and identity management, and coordination or participation in shared activities. Transmission is often a by-product of these motivations, and replication fidelity plays a limited role compared with transformations that adapt content to local incentives. Finally, the article suggests that platforms and communities can be understood as distinct niches, each characterised by different audience structures, affordances, metrics, and algorithmic pressures. This perspective reframes persistent debates on social media dynamics, including misinformation, radicalisation and polarisation, and the reasons behind online success.

Providing pro bono legal services is an important professional obligation that ensures that people who cannot afford representation still realize their rights. Unlike impact litigation, which seeks to overturn unjust laws or create new rights, pro bono direct legal services are not typically seen as oriented toward creating social change. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with thirty-six lawyers and non-lawyer legal volunteers, this article explores how bearing witness became a mechanism that blended pro bono services with social movement-like collective action to transform direct legal services within two liminal legal environments, the U.S.–Mexico border and immigration detention. These activities included (1) asserting and publicizing truth in the face of misconceptions and misinformation so the American public understood what was occurring and demanded policy change, (2) recruiting more volunteers to assist asylum seekers and in turn speak out, and (3) documenting the human impact of immigration laws and policies to ensure future harms would not occur. Because interviewees took part in up to three waves of interviews between 2019 and 2023, I also address the perceived outcomes of these efforts, including that interviewees felt that they increased knowledge and shifted some individuals’ perspectives.

The prevalence of false and misleading news has become an issue of great concern in recent years. Academic researchers, policymakers, and social media firms all continue to seek effective solutions to reduce the sharing of misinformation. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of two policies in particular: competition among media firms and fact-checking of published news articles by independent organizations. We first develop a theoretical model that predicts the effect of each policy and then conduct a behavioral experiment to test those predictions. Our experimental findings indicate that media competition is most effective at nipping misinformation in the bud because media firms spend significantly more resources on improving the accuracy of their news when readers obtain news from multiple sources. We also find that fact-checking improves the overall quality of news available to viewers; however, it does not incentivize firms to improve the accuracy of their own news articles. Last, our results from an interaction treatment suggest that under competition, fact-checking adversely affects firms’ investment in news accuracy.

Conspiratorial thinking is an indelible part of American politics; indeed, conspiracy theories proliferated in North America even before the founding of the United States. A current headwind of trends appears to facilitate a surge in conspiratorial thinking, including the increased spread and accessibility of misinformation, steady declines in public trust in authority figures, and an increasingly polarized electorate marked by mutual partisan animosity. The annual symposium of the UC Irvine Center for Neuropolitics brought together experts in law, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to discuss why and how conspiracy thought develops and persists. This paper synthesizes the insights from that symposium, addressing the foundations of conspiracy thinking in both individuals and society as a whole, and its place in the current American political landscape. Through integrating various disciplinary perspectives, the symposium aimed to identify possible pathways to alleviating the prevalence and influence of conspiratorial thinking.

In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Using an original 19‐country comparative survey study across diverse regions in the world (N = 19,037), we find that news users are likely to regard information on the Russian war in Ukraine as false. They are more likely to attribute false information to deliberative deception than to a lack of access to the war area or inaccurate expert knowledge. Russian sources are substantially more likely to be blamed for falsehoods than Ukrainian or Western sources – but these attribution biases depend on a country's position on the war. Our findings reveal that people mostly believe that falsehoods are intended to deceive them, and selectively associate misinformation with the opposed camp.

Political misinformation represents a challenge to contemporary democracies. It is widely acknowledged that misinformation is not only spread by individual users on social media, but also by politicians employing both digital and legacy media to disseminate biased or misleading content to advance their political agendas. This study explores the mechanisms through which misinformed statements made by politicians influence public opinion and examines the effectiveness of corrections from academic/official sources or fact-checking websites, also focusing on the role of partisanship. We investigate whether agreement with a misinformed statement on key policy issues – minimum wage, COVID-19 vaccination, and working hours – increases when it is attributed to a politician, and whether corrections by academic/official sources or fact-checkers reduce agreement. Through survey experiments conducted in Italy, we find that while misinformation from politicians does not always affect agreement with false statements, corrections generally decrease agreement. However, partisanship plays a crucial role, with individuals more likely to resist correction when misinformation comes from politicians they have more positive feelings toward. These findings shed light on the complex relationship between misinformation, the effectiveness of corrective messages, and political identity in shaping public opinion.

Ethnographic methods of all varieties contend with the idea of the “truth” of accounts and the meanings attached to them, as well as the importance of context in mitigating truth or falseness in how these accounts are presented. Discerning truth from lies and the purpose of both in the context of making meaning in a time and place is at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise. Because powerful images or messages evoke emotional reactions on social media or contributory websites like message boards, the relative accuracy of the representations they make is often less important than their reach and the ways they make and remake “reality” for their audiences. A picture or an image, even one attributed to a context or a meaning wholly independent of the context from which it emerged, becomes part of how people online see or experience an event. The context in which information is presented and the speakers or presenters of this information also condition its uptake and resonance. This paper argues that ethnography is uniquely suited to understand the effects and reach of decontextualized information and the ways it makes meaning, both on- and offline.

Information is a key variable in International Relations, underpinning theories of foreign policy, inter-state cooperation, and civil and international conflict. Yet IR scholars have only begun to grapple with the consequences of recent shifts in the global information environment. We argue that information disorder—a media environment with low barriers to content creation, rapid spread of false or misleading material, and algorithmic amplification of sensational and fragmented narratives—will reshape the practice and study of International Relations. We identify three major implications of information disorder on international politics. First, information disorder distorts how citizens access and evaluate political information, creating effects that are particularly destabilizing for democracies. Second, it damages international cooperation by eroding shared focal points and increasing incentives for noncompliance. Finally, information disorder shifts patterns of conflict by intensifying societal cleavages, enabling foreign influence, and eroding democratic advantages in crisis bargaining. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research.

Emotional appeals are a common manipulation tactic, and it is broadly assumed that emotionality increases belief in misinformation. However, past work often confounds the use of emotional language per se with the type of factual claims that tend to be communicated with emotion. In two experimental studies, we test the effects of manipulating the level of emotional language in false headlines while holding the factual claim constant. We find that, in the absence of a fact-check, the high-emotion version of a given factual claim was believed significantly less than the low-emotion version; in the presence of a fact-check, belief was comparatively low regardless of emotionality. A third experiment found that decreased belief in high-emotionality claims is greater for false claims than true claims, such that emotionality increases truth discernment overall. Finally, we analyze the social media platform X’s Community Notes program, in which users evaluate claims (‘Community Notes’) made by others. We find that Community Notes with more emotional language are less likely to be rated helpful. Our results suggest that, rather than being an effective tool for manipulating people into believing falsehoods, emotional language induces justified skepticism.