How false information spreads, and why corrections rarely catch up.
10 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing
Starbird et al. · 2014
Traces how false rumours accusing innocent people spread on Twitter after the Boston Marathon bombing, and argues crowdsourced 'digital vigilante'…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Spread of True and False News Online
Vosoughi, Roy & Aral · 2018
False stories on Twitter spread further, faster and more broadly than true ones, and humans rather than bots drive the difference.
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Propaganda Technique in the World War
Harold Lasswell · 1927
Analyses WWI propaganda as a deliberate technique for managing collective attitudes, arguing it is as necessary to modern war as any weapon and will…
+4 more at this level
12 works
Starbird et al.
Traces how false rumours accusing innocent people spread on Twitter after the Boston Marathon bombing, and argues crowdsourced 'digital vigilante' correction attempts often amplified the very misinformation they meant to debunk.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Roozenbeek & van der Linden
Shows that playing a short game in which participants create fake news themselves reduces their later susceptibility to real misinformation, supporting inoculation theory as a prebunking strategy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vosoughi, Roy & Aral
False stories on Twitter spread further, faster and more broadly than true ones, and humans rather than bots drive the difference.
6 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Nyhan & Reifler
Finds that correcting a political misperception can sometimes strengthen it among the people most predisposed to hold it, naming this the backfire effect.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Friggeri, Adamic, Eckles & Cheng
Tracks thousands of rumour-reshare cascades on Facebook against Snopes fact-checks and finds that public correction barely slows a false rumour's spread, while true and false cascades are structurally near-identical.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Chesney & Citron
Argues deepfakes threaten not just individual reputations but the shared factual predicate democratic debate depends on, and that existing law is poorly built to respond.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Douglas et al.
Reviews why people believe conspiracy theories, arguing the appeal is less about evidence than about unmet epistemic, existential and social needs the theories promise to satisfy.
Harold Lasswell
Analyses WWI propaganda as a deliberate technique for managing collective attitudes, arguing it is as necessary to modern war as any weapon and will only grow more systematic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Allport & Postman
Proposes that a rumour's strength grows with the importance of its subject multiplied by the ambiguity of the evidence around it, and traces how retelling systematically sharpens, levels and assimilates the story toward what tellers already expect.
Ziva Kunda
Argues motivation does not distort reasoning directly but biases which beliefs, memories and rules a person accesses and constructs on the way to a conclusion they already wanted to reach.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Brady et al.
Finds that adding moral-emotional language to a political tweet substantially increases how far it spreads within one's own ideological network, showing platforms amplify moralised content specifically.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Starbird, Arif & Wilson
Reframes disinformation campaigns as participatory work in which ordinary users, not just paid trolls, do most of the labour of producing and amplifying content, so banning 'bad actors' alone rarely stops them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.