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https://www.security.org/wp-content/themes/security.org/infographics/security/index.html

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1
Do you use two-factor authentication on your devices? For example both fingerprint authentication and a password.
Yes No

2
Do you use a password vault? This is where all of your passwords for multiple accounts are stored together securely.
Yes No

3
Do you use private browsing when you are online?
Yes No

4
Do you set all of your social media visibility to private?
Yes No

5
Do you regularly post photos on social media which share your location?
Yes No

6
Do you regularly check your bank transactions to make sure that there are no expenses that you are unaware of?
Yes No

7
Before entering your credit card details when online shopping, do you make sure that there is a padlock sign or proof that the website you are visiting is secure?
Yes No

8
Do you have security software installed on your computer, such as anti virus, anti spyware or firewall?
Yes No

9
If your computer prompts you to update the software, would you do this right away?
Yes No

10
Do you use a different password for each account you have a login for?
Yes No
RESTART QUIZ

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Take the quiz to discover how secure you are online and how you compare with the rest of the U.S.

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https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2021

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Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 92,000 online news consumers in 46 markets including India, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria, Colombia and Peru for the first time.

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https://mediawell.ssrc.org/getting-started/

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MediaWell is organized by a system of research topics. Currently we have twelve, and you can see them all . For content updates on each topic, follow us on Twitter @SSRC_mtp.

If you're new to the field of disinformation studies, we recommend starting with our live research reviews Defining "Disinformation" and Producers of Disinformation. These give an overview of some of the current issues.

For a deeper dive into a particular topic, go to that research topic's landing page. Each landing page can be accessed from the Research Topics drop-down menu, or from this page . At the Election Interference page, for example, you'll find its live research review, associated expert reflections, and a variety of other types of content.

Expert Reflections, Events, and our Citation Library are also directly accessible through MediaWell's main navigation bar.

In all, MediaWell contains six kinds of content:

Live Research Reviews are original articles that summarize the latest research and ongoing debates within a particular research topic. Eventually each research topic will have its own Living Research Review.

Expert Reflections are essays written for MediaWell by prominent researchers. They offer high-level analysis and make recommendations for policy changes and new research directions.

News content is aggregated from around the web. In addition to news articles, we aggregate reports, whitepapers and other non-scholarly content.

Scholars Database entries contain information about researchers and their active projects.

Events in our calendar are sortable by month, and searchable by keyword.

Our Citations Library, which is hosted by a free service called Zotero, contains academic articles, reports, and some journalism articles sorted into one or more research topics. For help using Zotero, see our FAQ, or the Zotero site.

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MediaWell is organized by a system of research topics. Currently we have twelve, and you can see them all . For content updates on each topic, follow us on Twitter @SSRC_mtp. If you're new to the field of disinformation studies, we recommend starting with our live research reviews Defining "Disinformation" and Producers of Disinformation.

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https://www.abc.net.au/education/media-literacy/

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Curriculum-linked learning resources for primary and secondary school teachers and students. Videos, games and interactives covering English, maths, history, science and more!

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https://www.poynter.org/mediawise/
"We teach people digital media literacy and fact-checking skills to spot misinformation and disinformation, with initiatives specifically designed to engage Gen Z, college students and older Americans."

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MediaWise empowers people of all ages to be more critical consumers of content online by teaching key media literacy skills.

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https://cor.stanford.edu/
The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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Free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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The Sift - subscribe - News Literacy Project

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https://newslit.org/educators/sift/

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The Sift is a free weekly newsletter for educators delivered during the school year that offers a rundown of the latest topics in news literacy - including trends and issues in misinformation, social media, artificial intelligence, journalism and press freedom. It provides discussion prompts, teaching ideas, classroom guides and a monthly video series that features professional journalists.

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https://www.idcare.org/

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WE RESPOND

IDCARE responds to many types of identity and cyber security concerns, including identity theft, hacking, phishing, telephone scams, romance scams, investment scams, data breaches, ransomware, and lost or stolen credentials.

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IDCARE Official Website | Identity Theft & Cyber Support

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IDCARE is Australia and New Zealand's national identity & cyber support service. We offer free phone consultations and advice from specialised identity and cyber security counsellors. See our Learning Centre to learn how to prepare, prevent, detect and respond to cyber related issues.

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681311000061

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Abstract

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms-such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis-to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm's reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don't understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities.

View full text

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Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media

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Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms-such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis-to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content.

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263237318300781

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Highlights

*

The "bright side" of social media and its uptake by society has received much research attention.

*

The corresponding "dark side" of social media has received much less research attention.

*

To study the deleterious impacts of social media, we introduce the dark side honeycomb framework.

*

The framework describes the functional multidimensionality of the dark side of social media.

*

We use this framework as a basis for a call-to-action for research on the dark side of social media.

Abstract

Research and practice have mostly focused on the "bright side" of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology. However, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even for society as a whole. Examples for this "dark side" of social media include cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.

View full text

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Social media? It's serious! Understanding the dark side of social media

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The "bright side" of social media and its uptake by society has received much research attention. * The corresponding "dark side" of social media has received much less research attention. * To study the deleterious impacts of social media, we introduce the dark side honeycomb framework.

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https://vimeo.com/560613785

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Children's digital privacy: 3 steps to take .mp4

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https://www.safekids.com/quiz/

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https://childrenandmedia.org.au/assets/files/apps-can-trap/Childrens-digital-privacy-what-are-the-risks-DETAILED-VERSION.pdf

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https://staysafeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/STOP.-THINK.-CONNECT.-Online-Safety-Tips-for-Older-Adults.pdf

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https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2022-01/report/unsolicited-communications-australia-consumer-experience-research-2021

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https://projectinfolit.org/pubs/algorithm-study/pil_algorithm-study_2020-01-15_algo-figure.png

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https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/11-social-media-red-flags-parents-should-know-about

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11 Social Media Red Flags Parents Should Know About

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Find out which social media features are cause for concern -- no matter which app your kid is using. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/

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Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

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Scamwatch is a website run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and provides information to consumers and small businesses about how to recognise, avoid and report scams.

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https://beconnected.esafety.gov.au/topic-library/essentials/safety-first

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Discover some of the essentials of cyber safety like how your browser can help keep you safer online, how to create and remember strong passwords, spot common scams like phishing scams, safely download documents including PDF files, learn about the different payment options, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, for shopping in-store and online, as well as run antivirus software.

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safety first | online courses | be connected

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Safety first | Online Courses | Be Connected

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Build your digital skills with Be Connected, an Australian Government initiative. Access hundreds of free short courses today.

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https://mediamanipulation.org/research/tracking-social-media-takedowns-and-content-moderation-during-2022-russian-invasion

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Tracking Social Media Takedowns and Content Moderation During the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

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https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/distributed-amplification-plandemic-documentary

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The Technology and Social Change Project was active from 2019-2023. The Media Manipulation Casebook was a major publication of the TaSC project, and will remain fully accessible at this URL going forward, but will no longer be actively updated.

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Plandemic, a 26-minute trailer video about coronavirus conspiracy theories, went viral in May 2020 because of distributed amplification. In response to its high viewership, major social media platforms moderated Plandemic and prepared for the full-length video. The platforms' efforts slowed the spread of Indoctornation, the anticipated 75-minute movie.

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https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/too-much-information/

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Welcome to 'Too much information' - our guide to navigating the coronavirus 'infodemic'. The team at First Draft has pulled this guide together to help you separate the helpful from the harmful and find the reliable in the rumor mill during the current coronavirus crisis. There is a whirlwind of speculation, hoaxes, false information and misleading content at the moment, and we know that it can be very hard to know what to trust.

It's clear that we need good information now more than ever, and it's never been more important to pause and consider what we see online - whether it's a fake cure, funny meme or out-and-out conspiracy theory. Even though most of us have the best intentions, if we share the wrong thing then we could wind up doing more harm than good.

So we've pulled this guide together to help you understand why misleading information gets shared so much and give you some practical tips, tricks and tools to help you double-check what you see online. You don't have to take it from start to finish, we've tried to make the guide snackable, so you can pick what feels most useful to you and dive in. But if you do want to cover it all, you can expect to find answers to questions like:

Just what on earth is an 'infodemic' anyway?

Where does false information come from and why does it spread?

What should I be most wary of?

How can I check if something's credible or cooked-up?

Is that picture what I think it is?

To share or not to share?

How can I keep my head at a time like this?

The impact of sharing

When we're sitting alone with our phone, reading WhatsApp messages or social media, hitting the share button feels like it would cause barely a ripple in the great scheme of things. But if we all do it, those ripples can become a tidal wave. At the moment we have to think of ourselves as publishers because what we share can influence as much as any article or news report. And, without meaning to, we can cause harm. If we share something that inadvertently causes panic and sends someone out stockpiling for example, and that inadvertently deprives someone in greater need, our good intentions can backfire. As publishers, we have a collective responsibility to make sure that the information we put out is accurate and based on facts.

Think about the last thing you shared online. Did you verify it, or pause to consider the likely impact on everyone who saw it before you shared it? Don't worry if you didn't, that's what this guide is all about.

What is an 'infodemic' and why is it a problem?

As a species, we're hardwired to gossip. Rumors, conspiracy theories and hoaxes are nothing new. Back when we lived in small villages, those village boundaries tended to be as far as the rumor spread. Today though, we're all living together in one big digital village, so information travels farther and faster. That can be a blessing, but it can also be a curse.

The term 'infodemic' was recently used by the World Health Organization (WHO). Put simply, it means that there's so much information out there about the coronavirus, that we don't know what to believe anymore. Misleading or incorrect information can spread like the virus itself.

Fear and love are powerful motivators. When we're faced with a global pandemic like coronavirus, people share information because they're scared and want to keep loved ones safe. It's our natural instinct to try and be helpful and warn others. But share the wrong thing and we can accidentally do more harm than good.

Navigating the infodemic isn't as simple as deciding if something is 'true' or 'false'. Some of it will be rooted in truth, some will be taken out of context, some will be deliberately created to cause mischief, and actually most of it will be shared by someone you trust who is just trying to help.

In the current infodemic we need to be more aware than ever of how and why information spreads, so we can understand and navigate what we find online and have better-informed conversations with family and friends.

As humans, we have an emotional relationship with information. We tend to share information that reinforces our world view and says something about who we want to be.

People like to feel connected to a 'tribe'. That tribe could be made up of members of the same political party, parents that don't vaccinate their children, activists concerned about climate change, or those belonging to a certain religion, race or ethnic group. Online, people tend to behave in accordance with their tribe's identity.

No matter what we believe, we are all susceptible to information if it reinforces our existing position, and can be easily seduced by stories that back up what we already believe.

Think about some of the things you have shared online recently. What did they say about you and your identity? What emotions did they make you feel?

We all have a friend or relative who is a bit overzealous when it comes to sharing. It's all very well when it's limited to funny jokes or memes, but misleading content can be more damaging. It is tempting to hit mute, but it's better to confront the issue rather than hide from it. Ignoring the spread of false information is not the answer. We do need to take a gentle approach when having these conversations though. The important thing is not to shame them or make them feel bad, but instead to be empathetic.

In one scenario, you just come straight out and tell them that they are wrong. But the problem is that when you do that they feel affronted and ashamed, so they are more likely to dig their heels in and double down on their beliefs.

In another scenario, you use empathetic language, show concern, and make it clear that we're all in this together. Maybe tell them that you've seen similar posts and that you're worried people out there are trying to scare us, or make money from us. Now their anger isn't aimed back at you, but at the person who originally misled them by creating the content in the first place.

The important thing is that it shouldn't feel like you versus the sharer. It should feel like you and the sharer versus the creator of the content.

Do you have a friend or family member who shares misinformation or problematic memes? Have you ever tried talking to them about it? How did it go? Could you have handled it any differently to get a better outcome?

Why we don't say 'f*** news'

Firstly, let's get the elephant out of the room. Let's talk about f*** news. F*** is a four letter word as far as we're concerned. "F*** news" has become a widely used term and something of a catch-all, but we're not fans of it.

The problem is that it doesn't describe the full spectrum of information we find online. Information isn't binary. It's not a choice between fake or not fake. The term can also be used as a weapon by politicians to dismiss news outlets they don't agree with. To make sense of the infodemic, we need to get into the complexity of it.

The four main themes of the infodemic

When it comes to misinformation about coronavirus, four distinct themes have emerged. We're sure you've seen at least one of them on your screens, if not all of them. They're spreading through social media and messaging apps in a similar pattern to the virus itself, hitting each country in turn as the crisis travels around the world.

1. Where it came from

Misinformation thrives when there's an absence of verified facts. It's human nature to try to make sense of new information based on what we already know. We're all too eager to fill in the gaps.

So, when Chinese authorities reported a new strain of coronavirus to the World Health Organization (WHO) in December, social media users flooded the information vacuum with their own theories about where it came from.

According to conspiracy theorists, it was created in a lab by Microsoft founder Bill Gates as part of a globalist agenda to lower populations. Or by the Chinese government as a weapon against the United States. Or by the United States as a weapon against China. There are also a number of inaccurate conspiracy theories claiming that radiation from 5G towers can be linked to coronavirus.

2. How it spreads

Many false claims are rooted in a very real sense of confusion and fear. Social media users are trading what they think is useful advice for likes and shares, but the real currency here is emotion. This is especially true when it comes to information on how coronavirus spreads. The WHO website is full of information countering false claims, including that both hot and cold weather kills the coronavirus (they don't), that mosquitoes can transmit the disease (they can't) and that an ultraviolet lamp will sterilize your skin (it won't, but it might burn it).

3. Symptoms and treatment

Bad advice about treatments and cures is by far the most common form of misinformation, and it can have serious consequences. At best it stops people from getting the proper care they need, and at worst it costs lives. In Iran, where alcohol is illegal, 44 people died and hundreds were hospitalized after drinking home-made alcohol to protect against the disease, according to Iranian media.

We have also seen wild speculation on the symptoms of the virus. A list of checks and symptoms went viral around the world in early March. Depending on where you got it from, the list was attributed to Taiwanese experts, Japanese doctors, Unicef, the CDC, Stanford Hospital Board and the classmate of the sender who held a master's degree and worked in Shenzhen. The messages suggested that hot drinks and heat could kill the virus, and that holding your breath for 10 seconds every morning could diagnose it. None of these claims were proven.

4. How we're responding

Both the pandemic and the infodemic are truly global by nature. People are sharing content across borders through social media in an effort to warn each other of what's to come.

Photos or videos which claim to show panic buying have spread quickly from country to country. An old video of a supermarket sale in 2011 was reshared and attributed to panic-buying in various cities across the UK, Spain, and Belgium.

Rumors about how different governments are reacting to the pandemic also travel far and wide, as people view them as a sign of what could be coming next. With each new government measure comes an outbreak of misrepresented pictures. They might claim that the police are getting heavy-handed with people going outside, or that the army is roaming the streets to enforce martial law.

Recently, false screenshots of texts have circulated in the UK, claiming that the government is surveilling people using their phones and issuing fines by text message if they go outside. Again, this is rooted in a kernel of truth - the British government did send out a text message to every person in the UK saying they shouldn't leave the house except for essential trips.

Disinformation vs misinformation

You may have heard these two terms used interchangeably to talk about the infodemic, but there is an important distinction when it comes to what's being created, why it's being created, and how it spreads. And if we're going to make sense of the infodemic, we need to be speaking the same language.

Disinformation

When people intentionally create false or misleading information to make money, have political influence, damage someone's reputation or maliciously cause trouble or harm.

Misinformation

When people share disinformation but they don't realize it's false or misleading, often because they're trying to help.

The 'Deceptive Seven'

Within those two overarching categories (disinformation and misinformation), we also refer to seven types of content that you'll commonly find in the infodemic. They help us understand the complexity of online information and the shades of gray that exist between true and false. They live in a spectrum, so more than one type can apply to a specific piece of content. Introducing: the deceptive seven.

1. Satire

Satire is a sure sign of a healthy democracy. A good satirist will shine a light on an uncomfortable truth and take it to ludicrous extremes. They do this in a way that leaves the audience in no doubt about what's true and what's not. The audience recognizes the truth, recognizes the exaggeration and therefore recognizes the joke.

The problem is that satire can be used strategically to spread rumors and conspiracies. If challenged, it can just be shrugged off that it was never meant to be taken seriously. "It was just a joke" can become an excuse for spreading misleading information.

Satire can be a powerful tool because the more it gets shared, the more the original context gets lost. In a newspaper, you know if you're reading the opinion section or the cartoon section. This isn't the case online. Content may have come originally from a well known satirical site, but as it spreads it loses that connection very quickly, getting turned into screenshots or memes.

2. False connection

Beware of clickbait. This is when you see a headline or photo that's designed to make you want to click it, but when you click through the content is of dubious value or interest, to say the least. We call this 'false connection' - sensational language used to drive clicks, which then falls short for the reader when they get to the site.

In a study, researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute (Inria) found that 59% of all the links shared on Twitter were not opened first, meaning that people shared them without reading past the headline. According to one of the co-authors of the study, Inria's Arnaud Legout, we are "more willing to share an article than read it".

It's unlikely that media organizations will stop using clickbait techniques - they need clicks, after all - but as readers we need to be wary of them as they often use polarizing and emotive language to drive traffic, and this can cause deeper challenges.

3. Misleading content

What counts as 'misleading' can be hard to define. It comes down to context and nuance: How much of a quote has been omitted? Has the data been skewed? Has the way a photo been cropped changed the meaning of the image? This complexity is why we're such a long way from having artificial intelligence flag this type of content. Computers understand true and false, but 'misleading' is a grey area.

The WorldPop project at the University of Southampton published a study in February estimating how many people may have left Wuhan before the region was quarantined. When tweeting a link to the study, they chose a picture which mapped global air-traffic routes and travel for the entirety of 2011. This "terrifying map" was then published by various Australian and British news outlets without being verified. Although the WorldPop project deleted their misleading tweet, the damage had been done.

4. Imposter content

Our brains are always looking for heuristics (mental shortcuts) to help us understand information. Seeing a brand or person that we already know is a very powerful shortcut. We trust what we know and give it credibility. Imposter content is false or misleading content that claims to be from established figures, brands, organizations or journalists.

The amount of information people take in on a daily basis, even just from their phones, means heuristics have become even more impactful. The trust we have in certain celebrities, brands and organizations can be manipulated to make us quickly share information that isn't accurate.

5. False context

This term is used to describe content that is genuine, but has been warped and reframed in dangerous ways. We're increasingly seeing the weaponization of context. This is one of the most common trends relating to the infodemic, and it is very easy to produce. All it takes is to find an image, video or old news story, and reshare it to fit a new narrative.

One of the first viral videos after the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020 showed a market selling bats, rats, snakes, and other animal meat products. Different versions of the video were shared online claiming to be from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the new virus originated. The video was originally uploaded in July 2019, and it was shot in Langowan Market in Indonesia. However, the video was shared widely online because it played on existing anti-Chinese sentiments and preconceptions.

6. Manipulated content

Manipulated content is when something genuine is altered. Here content isn't completely made-up or fabricated, but manipulated to change the narrative. This is most often done to photographs and images. This kind of manipulation relies on the fact that most of us merely glance at images while scrolling on phone screens, so the content doesn't have to be sophisticated or perfect. All it has to do is fit a narrative and be good enough to 'look real' in the two or three seconds it takes for people to choose whether to share it or not.

The Sino-Sudanese visit

On February 3rd, 2020 the Sudanese Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Ambassador to Sudan met to discuss the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. In the next couple of weeks, the photographs of that meeting were photoshopped to show the Sudanese Minister wearing a face mask. The images were shared widely on social media, including comments like "Africans don't want to take chances with the Chinese".

7. Fabricated content

Fabricated content is anything that is 100% false. This is the end of the spectrum and the only content we can really call 'fake'. Staged videos, made up websites and completely fabricated documents would all fall into this category.

Some of this is what we call 'synthetic media' or 'deepfakes'. Synthetic media is a catch-all term for fabricated media produced using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Through synthesizing or combining different elements of existing video or audio, AI can relatively easily create 'new' content in which individuals appear to say or do things that never happened.

Most of what we share is fuelled by emotion. Misleading stories spread like wildfire because they prey so heavily on our emotions. To avoid fuelling the fire, we need to pause for a second and switch off our emotions - go cold, be analytical, be more robot. Easier said than done but all it takes is a few seconds of pause.

It's been proven that we both share and remember information that appeals to our emotions: stories that make us angry, happy, or scared; or ones that make us laugh out loud. It's harder to press the mental delete button on something that's struck fear or joy into our hearts, even if our head is questioning it.

For example, there were claims that "patient zero" in Italy was a migrant worker who refused to self-isolate after testing positive. This held a kernel of truth, as a delivery driver was fined for doing exactly that, but there was no evidence he introduced the virus to the country. That detail appears to have been added by a website associated with the European alt-right.What's more, our brains are more biased to accept something if it confirms our existing views. Something doesn't have to be true to feel like it should be true. It's also worth remembering that misleading information tends to be grounded in truth, rather than entirely made up. Things that sound 'about right'. Anything with a kernel of truth is far more successful in terms of persuading and engaging people.

If we see something online that feels like it should be true and touches an emotional hotspot, it triggers an almost involuntary reaction to share it and tell people about it. So pause, recognize that emotional response, question whether you might be getting tricked and practice 'emotional skepticism'.

Think back to something you recently shared. How do you think the person who created the content wanted you to feel? Did you share it based on emotion? Would you still share it now? If so, that's fine - it's good to share. Just make sure you pause and consider your emotional reactions first.

Over these next three videos, we will go through a number of ways that you might be able to help verify the source of a tweet or social post on your phone. We'll show you how to check if any images you find have been used before (reverse image searching), if the picture's location is where it claims to be (geolocation) and if someone really is who their bio claims they are (profile verification).

It's true what they say: images really are worth a thousand words. They can also tell a thousand stories, many of which aren't true. While images can be great for explaining complicated things, capturing a moment or just cheering us up, it's important that they're shared mindfully. As with most things, it comes down to context. What was the original story behind the image? And has that story become lost or skewed?

Fuelling xenophobia

It's important to pause before sharing any images that could feed stereotypes. Do you need to be sharing an article or post featuring a photo of an Asian person wearing a face mask, for example? And even if memes are funny, remember that they can also help fuel xenophobia and stereotypes.

Causing panic

The same goes for sharing images that could alarm people unnecessarily. Images of people wearing hazmat suits or pictures of empty shelves can feed panic and accelerate behaviors like stockpiling, which in themselves can be harmful.
As a general rule, at a time like this it's better to share images that reinforce the behaviors we want to see in society - things like resilience, kindness and bravery.

This is a very difficult time for us all. To feel stressed and anxious at a time like this is to feel human, and being barraged with scary messages and news reports day in, day out certainly doesn't help. But we owe it to ourselves and to the people around us to try and look after our mental and emotional wellbeing. We need to be strong for each other to get through this crisis. Here's a few things that might help:​

1. Stay connected

Social distancing doesn't have to be anti-social. Video calling is giving us all the benefits of face-to-face contact and millions of people are turning to it for virtual dinner parties, pub quizzes, or just a natter with friends and family. But if you're not feeling presentable (let's face it, we're all dressing for comfort right now) you can stay connected via messaging apps and social media. Just try to keep positive and avoid excessive chat about the crisis if you can.

2. Know when to switch off

Checking in with the main headlines from trusted sources a few times a day is enough to stay informed at the moment. Plugging into rolling updates 24/7 will quickly make you feel overwhelmed. If you must have breaking news push alerts on your mobile device, choose just one outlet to receive them from, not a dozen. Unsubscribe from newsletters that use alarmist subject lines or fill you with anxiety when they arrive in your inbox. Remember: we all need to be able to disconnect completely from time to time to clear our heads.

3. Stick to official guidance

If you're already prone to health-anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the global focus on the virus is likely hitting hard. Suddenly you're hearing your usually unwanted OCD thoughts like hand washing and surface cleaning everywhere you turn. It's important to follow the official advice for protecting yourself and others from the virus, but also to know that it is not necessary to go above and beyond it. Know the facts and guidance, but don't overthink it.

4. Create a self-care plan

Self-care is too important to leave to chance. It deserves planning and prioritization. Start with the essentials: getting enough sleep, going offline before bed, eating well, and exercising. Do whatever you can to get your mind onto something else. Take up a hobby, read a book, watch television, meditate, write a journal, take a bath or socialize through video calls. If it makes you feel happy, make it happen.

5. Relax your standards

Finally, it's important to note that these are unprecedented times and the usual rules and gold standards don't have to apply. So be kind to yourself and be realistic about what you can do. You don't have to be a perfectionist and this isn't the time to push yourself too hard. Do what you can. 'Good enough' actually is good enough.

Where to go for reliable information

The infodemic that's accompanying the coronavirus outbreak is making it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. Knowing where to turn to for credible advice is vital, so here we'll list some reliable sources.

Remember: not all research is created equal. Just because something is presented in a chart or a table, doesn't mean the data behind it is solid.

Reuters looked at scientific studies published on the coronavirus since the outbreak began. Of the 153 they identified, 92 were not peer-reviewed despite including some pretty outlandish and unverified claims, like linking coronavirus to HIV or snake-to-human transmission. The problem with "speed science", as Reuters called it, is that people can panic or make wrong policy decisions before the data has been properly researched.

SOURCE: Reuters, 2020. Speed Science: The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research

Government departments and agencies

These government departments provide updates on the number of coronavirus cases, government activities, public health advice, and media contacts:

INGOs and NGOs

These non-governmental organizations provide global and regional data and guidance on coronavirus:

Academic institutions

These organizations and institutions provide research and data on coronavirus, as well as expert commentary.

Further reading

An evolving glossary

The infodemic is a complex thing, and it's changing all the time. We hope that this glossary helps you to understand it, talk about it and navigate it.

This glossary includes 38 words and you can use CMD + F (control + find) to search through the content, or just scroll down the list.

Amplification

When content is shared on the social web in high numbers, or when the mainstream media gives attention or oxygen to a fringe rumor or conspiracy. Content can be amplified organically through coordinated efforts by motivated communities and/or bots, or by paid advertisements or "boosts" on social platforms. First Draft's Rory Smith and Carlotta Dotto wrote up an explainer about the science and terminology of bots.

Algorithm

Algorithms in social and search platforms provide a sorting and filtering mechanism for content that users see on a "newsfeed" or search results page. Algorithms are constantly adjusted to increase the time a user spends on a platform. How an algorithm works is one of the most secretive components to social and search platforms; there has been little transparency with researchers, the press or the public. Digital marketers are well-versed on changes to the algorithm and it's these tactics - using videos, "dark posts," tracking pixels, etc. - that also translate well for disinformation campaigns and bad actors.

Anonymous message boards

A discussion platform that does not require people who post to publicly reveal their real name in a handle or username, like Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and Discord. Anonymity can allow for discussions that might be more honest, but can also become toxic, and often without repercussions to the person posting. Reporting recommendation: as with 4chan, if you choose to include screenshots, quotes, and links to the platform, know that published reports that include this information have the potential to fuel recruitment to the platform, amplify campaigns that are designed to attack reporters and news organizations or sow mischief and confusion, and inadvertently create search terms/drive search to problematic content.

Analytics (sometimes called "metrics")

Numbers that are accumulated on every social handle and post, and sometimes used to analyze the "reach" or extent to which how many other people might have seen or engaged with a post.

API

An API or application programming interface is when data from one web tool or application can be exchanged with, or received by, another. Many working to examine the source and spread of polluted information depend upon access to social platform APIs, but not all are created equal and the extent of publicly available data varies from platform to platform. Twitter's open and easy-to-use API has enabled more research and investigation of its network, which is why you are more likely to see research done on Twitter than on Facebook.

Artificial intelligence ("AI")

Computer programs that are "trained" to solve problems. These programs "learn" from data parsed through them, adapting methods and responses in a way that will maximize accuracy. As disinformation grows in its scope and sophistication, some look to AI as a way to effectively detect and moderate concerning content, like the Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos's chatbot Fátima, which replies to questions from the public with fact-checks via Facebook Messenger. AI can also contribute to the problem of things like "deepfakes" and enabling disinformation campaigns that can be targeted and personalized much more efficiently.² Reporting recommendation: WITNESS has led the way to understanding and preparing for "synthetic media" and "deepfakes". See also the report by WITNESS' Sam Gregory and First Draft " Mal-uses of AI-generated Synthetic Media and Deepfakes: Pragmatic Solutions Discovery Convening."

Automation

The process of designing a "machine" to complete a task with little or no human direction. Automation takes tasks that would be time-consuming for humans to complete and turns them into tasks that are quickly completed by a machine. For example, it is possible to automate the process of sending a tweet, so a human doesn't have to actively click "publish." Automation processes are the backbone of techniques used to effectively manufacture the amplification of disinformation. First Draft's Rory Smith and Carlotta Dotto have written an explainer about the science and terminology of bots.

Deepfakes

Fabricated media produced using artificial intelligence. By synthesizing different elements of existing video or audio files, AI enables relatively easy methods for creating 'new' content, in which individuals appear to speak words and perform actions which are not based on reality. Although still in its infancy, it is likely we will see examples of this type of synthetic media used more frequently in disinformation campaigns as these techniques become more sophisticated.⁹ Reporting recommendation: WITNESS has led the way to understanding and preparing for "synthetic media" and "deepfakes." See also: the report by WITNESS' Sam Gregory and First Draft " Mal-uses of AI-generated Synthetic Media and Deepfakes: Pragmatic Solutions Discovery Convening."

Deplatforming

The removal of an account from a platform like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. The goal is to remove a person from a social platform to reduce their reach. Casey Newton writes that there is "evidence that forcing hate figures and their websites to continuously relocate is effective at diminishing their reach over time."

Disinformation campaign

A coordinated effort by a single actor or group of actors, organizations or governments to foment hate, anger, and doubt in a person, systems and institutions. Bad actors often use known marketing techniques and exploit the design of platforms to give agency to toxic and confusing information, particularly around critical events like democratic elections. The ultimate goal is for their messaging to reach the mainstream media.

Doxing or doxxing

The act of publishing private or identifying information about an individual online, without their permission. This information can include full names, addresses, phone numbers, photos and more.¹¹ Doxing is an example of malinformation, which is accurate information shared publicly to cause harm.

Disinformation

False information that is deliberately created or disseminated with the express purpose of causing harm. Producers of disinformation typically have political, financial, psychological or social motivations.

Encryption

The process of encoding data so that it can be interpreted only by intended recipients. Many popular messaging services like Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp encrypt the text, photos, and videos sent between users. Encryption prevents third parties from reading the content of intercepted messages. Encryption also thwarts researchers and journalists from attempting to monitor mis- or disinformation being shared on the platform. As more bad actors are deplatformed and the messaging becomes more volatile and coordinated, these conversations will take place on closed messaging apps which law enforcement, the public, and researchers and journalists who are trying to understand the motivations and messaging of these groups will no longer be able to access them.

Fake followers

Anonymous or imposter social media accounts created to portray false impressions of popularity or credibility on another account. Social media users can pay for fake followers as well as fake likes, views, and shares to give the appearance of a larger, more engaged audience. For example, one English-based service offers YouTube users one million "high-quality" views and 50,000 likes for $3,150. The number of followers can build a cache for a profile or give the impression of credibility.

Information disorder

A phrase created by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakshan to place into context the three types of problematic content online:

Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant.

Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm.

Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere.

LinkedIn

One of the few US platforms allowed in China, LinkedIn can be a good starting point for digital footprinting an online source. Bellingcat published a useful tipsheet on how to get the most out of this platform.

Malinformation

Genuine information that is shared to cause harm. This includes private or revealing information that is spread to harm a person or reputation.

Meme

Coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, is an idea or behavior that spreads person-to-person throughout a culture by propagating rapidly, and changing over time. The term is now used most frequently to describe captioned photos or GIFs, often incubated on 4chan or Reddit, which have spread online. Take note: memes can be powerful vehicles of disinformation and often receive more engagement than a news article on the same topic from a mainstream outlet.

Misinformation

Information that is false, but not intended to cause harm. For example, individuals who don't know a piece of information is false may spread it on social media in an attempt to be helpful.

Normie

Online slang meaning a person who consumes mainstream news, uses online platforms and follows popular opinion. It's not intended as a compliment.

OSINT

An acronym for open-source intelligence. Intelligence agents, researchers, and journalists investigate and analyze publicly available information to confirm or refute assertions made by governments or verify the location and time of day for photos and videos, among many other operations. OSINT online communities are incredibly helpful for exploring and explaining new tools, how investigators have arrived at a conclusion, and often offer help with verifying information. A good example of this is the work Bellingcat did to find the whereabouts of a wanted criminal in the Netherlands in March 2019 - an investigation helped by sixty Twitter users over the course of a single day.

Reddit

A threaded-discussion message board that started in 2005 and requires registration to post. Reddit is the fifth most-popular site in the US, with 330 million registered users, called "redditors," who post in subreddits. The subreddit, "the_Donald," was one of the most active and vitriolic during the 2016 US election cycle.

Satire

Writing that uses literary devices such as ridicule and irony to criticize elements of society. Satire can become misinformation if audiences misinterpret it as fact. There is a known trend of disinformation agents labeling content as satire to prevent it from being flagged by fact-checkers. Some people, when caught, cling to the label of satire, as did a teacher in Florida who was discovered to have a racist podcast.

Shallowfakes

Low-quality manipulations that change the way a video plays. Awareness of shallowfakes increased in April and May 2019 when an edited video of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi circulated online. The clip had been slowed down to give the illusion that she was drunk while speaking at a recent event. Shallowfake manipulation is more concerning at present than deepfakes, as free tools are available to subtly alter a video, making them quick to produce. Reporting recommendations: enlist the help of a video forensic when a video trends that appears to be out of character with the person or people featured.

Shitposting

The act of throwing out huge amounts of content, most of it ironic, low-quality trolling, for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction in less Internet-savvy viewers. The ultimate goal is to derail productive discussion and distract readers.

Spam

Unsolicited, impersonal online communication, generally used to promote, advertise or scam the audience. Today, spam is mostly distributed via email, and algorithms detect, filter and block spam from users' inboxes. Similar technologies to those implemented to curb spam emails could potentially be used in the context of information disorder, or at least offer a few lessons to be learned.

Synthetic Media

A catch-all term for the artificial production, manipulation, and modification of data and media by automated means, especially through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, such as for the purpose of misleading people or changing its original meaning.

TikTok

Launched in 2017 as a rebrand of the app Music.ly by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok is a mobile-app video platform. Wired reported in August 2019 that TikTok is fuelling India's hate speech epidemic. Casey Newton offers great distillation for what's at stake, and Facebook is using the app's growth in popularity as a proof point for a "crowded market" in an appeal to lawmakers to avoid regulation.

Troll

Used to refer to any person harassing or insulting others online. While it has also been used to describe human-controlled accounts performing bot-like activities, some trolls prefer to be known and often use their real name.

Trolling

The act of deliberately posting offensive or inflammatory content to an online community with the intent of provoking readers or disrupting the conversation.

Troll farm

A group of individuals engaging in trolling or bot-like promotion of narratives in a coordinated fashion. One prominent troll farm was the Russia-based Internet Research Agency that spread inflammatory content online in an attempt to interfere in the U.S. presidential election.

Two-factor authentication (2FA)

A second way to identify yourself when logging in to an app or website, 2FA is a more secure way to access your accounts. It is usually associated with your mobile phone number, so that you can receive an SMS with a security code to enter when prompted, giving you access to the app or site. This step can be annoying, but getting hacked due to a weakness in your protocols is more so. Reporting recommendation: protect yourself and your sources by setting up two-factor authentication on every app and website (especially password manager and financial sites) that offers it. It's also recommended to use a free password manager like LastPass, long passwords of 16 characters or more, a VPN, and browse in incognito when viewing toxic information online ( Chrome, Firefox).

Verification

The process of determining the authenticity of information posted by unofficial sources online, particularly visual media.²⁵ It emerged as a new skill set for journalists and human rights activists in the late 2000s, most notably in response to the need to verify visual imagery during the "Arab Spring." Fact-checking looks at official records only, not unofficial or user-generated content, although fact-checking and verification often overlap and will likely merge.

VPN, or virtual private network

Used to encrypt a user's data and conceal his or her identity and location. A VPN makes it difficult for platforms to know where someone pushing disinformation or purchasing ads is located. It is also sensible to use a VPN when investigating online spaces where disinformation campaigns are being produced.

WeChat

Started in 2011 as a WhatsApp-like messaging app for closed communication between friends and family in China, the app is now relied upon to interact with friends on Moments (a feature similar to the Facebook timeline), reading articles sent from WeChat Public Accounts (public, personal or company accounts that publish stories), calling a taxi, booking movie tickets and paying bills with a single tap. The app, which has 1 billion users, is also reported to be a massive Chinese government surveillance operation. Reporting recommendation: WeChat is popular with Chinese immigrants globally, so if your beat includes immigration, it's important to understand how the app works and how information gets exchanged.

Wedge Issue

These are controversial topics that people care about and have strong feelings about. Disinformation is designed to trigger a strong emotional response so that people will share it - either out of outrage, fear, humor, disgust, love, or anything else from the broad range of human emotions. The high emotional volatility of these topics makes them a target for agents of disinformation to use as a way to get people to share information without thinking twice. For example politics, policy, the environment, refugees, immigration, corruption, vaccines, women's rights, etc.

WhatsApp

With an estimated 1.6 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app and the third-most-popular social platform following Facebook (2.23 billion) and YouTube (1.9 billion) in terms of active monthly users. WhatsApp launched in 2009 and Facebook acquired the app in February 2014. In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, however, there were data breaches by May 2019, which has made users nervous about privacy and data protection. First Draft was the first NGO to have API access to the platform with our Brazilian election project Comprova. Even with special access, it was difficult to know where disinformation started and where it might go next.

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Too much information: a public guide to navigating the infodemic - First Draft

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Welcome to 'Too much information' - our guide to navigating the coronavirus 'infodemic'. The team at First Draft has pulled this guide together to help you separate the helpful from the harmful and find the reliable in the rumor mill during the current coronavirus crisis.

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https://firstdraftnews.org/tackling/protect-your-voice-a-toolkit-for-australian-influencers-and-celebrities/

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Avoid amplification

Audiences receive information from a range of sources, including the influencers they follow. But influencers can be targeted by those trying to spread disinformation in order to their false stories. Influencers in Australia and New Zealand are not immune, so we've developed this guide to help you protect your voice.

Dodge disinformation

Social media celebrities can unwittingly be used as a powerful in promoting false information and conspiracy theories. Mis- and disinformation relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, bushfires, 5G and other conspiracy theories has proliferated across the globe.

Spread the knowledge

Anyone with a platform has a voice. And anyone with a voice has the power to influence. The lessons in this toolkit and the conversations from First Draft's seven-day social media campaign will help all of us play a part in cleaning up our information environment.

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Protect your voice: a toolkit for influencers and celebrities in Australia and New Zealand - First Draft

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Our new toolkit aims to help influencers understand and avoid spreading misinformation.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-27/australians-say-they-do-not-trust-influencers-but-do-they-really/100164654

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When Australians are asked whom they trust, their answer is near unanimous: definitely not social media influencers.

97% of Australians surveyed say they trust doctors and nurses

Only 3 per cent of Australians trust social media influencers

More Australians rated "misinformation" as a threat to the nation than any other issue in the survey

This year's Australia Talks research - a national survey of more than 60,000 people - explores our growing concerns about misinformation and our waning trust in traditional media.

The study also measures our attitudes towards professional groups - confirming, for example, Australians' ongoing, strong level of trust in doctors and nurses.

We regard scientists and police highly, as well as judges and military personnel - though trust in those latter two groups has slipped in recent years.

Far lower in our list of esteemed company are religious leaders (74 per cent of Australians responded either "not much" or "not at all" when asked how much they trusted them), celebrities (93 per cent) and - worse of the worst - influencers (97 per cent).

But that resounding "no" to the personalities of Instagram, YouTube and TikTok sits uneasily with massive growth in the role that influencers play in modern marketing.

Indeed, the survey begs the question: are we being influenced by influencers without realising it? (The answer, obviously, is yes.)

Influencers are effective because 'they're like you and me'

As an industry, social-media influencing almost doubled in size in the past two years, as the reach of once-dominant media like newspapers and broadcast television shrivelled.

At the top, people like Australian fitness advocate Kayla Itsines enjoy extraordinary prominence: 30 million followers on Facebook and another 13 million on Instagram.

But while Itsines fits the influencer stereotype - young, smiling and dressed in activewear - the success of internet personalities often lies in their ability to relate to Everyman.

University of Melbourne computer scientist Dana McKay researches how people absorb information that affects their decisions.

"None of us like to believe that we're being influenced; we like to think we're smarter than the marketers," Dr McKay says.

Yet the reason influencers are used more - and, increasingly, paid more - is because they are more effective.

Dr McKay says people who encounter a product by scrolling through their social media feed are more likely to be affected by that information than by traditional advertising - though both work.

"It feels much more natural than a TV ad or a pop-up appearing in the middle of the screen," she says.

"Marketing is powerful, but where we don't even perceive it as an attempt to sway our opinion, of course it's more powerful.

"Especially if it's coming from someone that we can look at and say 'that person is someone like me'."

Influencing is far more than 'fitspo' and make-up

Amber Robinson is a social media strategist who advises businesses on using influencers.

She says antipathy towards internet personalities, as revealed in the Australia Talks survey, is perhaps unsurprising - but it's likely based on misconceptions.

"When people say the word 'influencer', they tend to think of a very narrow definition of influencer, which might be the 'fitspo', young, female influencer on Instagram," Ms Robinson says.

"They don't think about all the other personalities that they take advice and inspiration from."

Not all influencers, she points out, are paid for spruiking products. Sometimes, businesses simply hope to get the person interested in what they do, so they can share that interest.

Among the Australians with the biggest online reaches are video gamers and comics, such Perth's Ethan Marrell, known online as "Ozzy Man".

Ms Robinson says that, regardless of whether Australians realise they are being influenced, these personalities are becoming more influential.

And big businesses know that using influencers works.

"People aren't consuming mainstream advertising any more," she says.

"They're finding people online that they either view as aspirational or relatable - and they are taking their advice on some things."

Growing fears of the misinformation 'threat'

Earlier this year, Facebook kicked celebrity chef Peter Evans off its platform after he repeatedly used it to spread falsehoods about COVID-19.

This week, the Therapeutic Goods Administration fined Evans almost $80,000 for selling a machine he wrongly claimed could heal a range of ailments.

But Evans' treatment is something of an exception amid growing concerns that influencers are largely unscrutinised by advertising regulators.

Some prominent online personalities often fail to disclose whether they are paid for their messages about products.

Problems like these may have contributed to a near-universal view among Australians: misinformation is now a threat to the nation.

The Australia Talks survey also shows that most of us (79 per cent) say it is becoming harder to know which sources of information to trust.

And with opinion split evenly on whether journalists can be trusted (50 per cent either way), one thing seems clear about this emerging age of scepticism: sorting facts from fakes will be part of our daily lives.
The Australia Talks National Survey asked 60,000 Australians about their lives and what keeps them up at night. Use our interactive tool to see the results and how your answers compare. Then, tune in at 8:00pm on Monday, June 21 to watch hosts Annabel Crabb and Nazeem Hussain take you through the key findings and explore the survey with some of Australia's best-loved celebrities.

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We asked who you trusted. This is who you don't: Instagram influencers

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Most of us believe it is becoming harder to know whom to trust, and almost all Australians rate misinformation as a threat to the nation.

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Doomscrolling refers to a unique media habit where social media users persistently attend to negative information in their newsfeeds about crises, disasters, and tragedies. Given the potential prevalence of this practice and its timely but chronic relevance for user experiences, political perceptions, well-being, and other outcomes, this project aimed to develop and validate a self-report measure of doomscrolling. Participant focus groups and an expert panel contributed to the refinement of an item bank, assessed in two survey studies for item structure, reliability, and construct validity. The item bank was tested with survey panelists across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; OECD ( = 401) to develop a unidimensional, 15-item scale with good reliability. Doomscrolling was less prevalent than anticipated, but variable. Tests of validity with survey panelists ( N = 502) indicated that doomscrolling can be considered a distinct concept, and that it was closely related to online vigilance, problematic use of the internet and social media, and fear of missing out (FOMO). Doomscrolling was also linked to passive social media use, habitual media use, anxiety, poor self-control, and several personality traits. Men, younger adults, and the political-engaged were more likely to engage in doomscrolling.

Keywords: social media, newsfeed, negative news, media habits, scale development

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Kathryn D. Coduto, Leonard Reinecke, Judith E. Rosenbaum, Linjuan Rita Men, Jay Hmielowski, and Michael F. Weigold for their thoughtful and generous comments on our measurement items.

Funding: This study was supported by the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida.

Disclosures: There are no known conflicts of interest.

Open Science Disclosures:
The data are available at https://osf.io/u9f6h/
The study materials are available at https://osf.io/u9f6h/
The preregistered design is available at https://osf.io/u9f6h/

Contributing editors: Tobias Greitemeyer was the Action Editor for this article. C. Shawn Green, Nicholas David Bowman, and Tobias Greitemeyer were the Special Collection Editors.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Benjamin K. Johnson, Department of Advertising, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida, 1885 Stadium Road, Gainesville, FL 32611, United States [email protected]
The term doomscrolling emerged in early 2020 to commonly describe a digital media practice which took on greater life during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and social distancing (Barabak, 2020). Coined in 2018, and later popularized by journalist Karen Ho (Garcia-Navarro, 2020), doomscrolling refers to a state of media use typically characterized as individuals persistently scrolling through their social media newsfeeds with an obsessive focus on distressing, depressing, or otherwise negative information (Slaughter, 2020). In this article, we build upon and move beyond popular descriptions (e.g., Chen, 2020; Garcia-Navarro, 2020; Slaughter, 2020; Watercutter, 2020) to conceptualize doomscrolling as a unique media habit, attempt to measure it, and identify related phenomena.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed people's ways of life by necessitating new measures including social distancing and shutdowns of businesses, schools, and other workplaces (Galea et al., 2020). During emergencies such as pandemics, a wide variety of sources produce and distribute information about the topic, much of which is primarily negative (Sell et al., 2017). In this context, smartphones and social media newsfeeds, which are designed to encourage frequent or extended engagement, can exacerbate a need to stay informed, and facilitate higher-than-usual amounts of fixation on negative news browsing.

We propose to assess whether doomscrolling is a distinct and empirically detectable phenomenon, which acts as expected, by attempting to develop and validate a scale to measure the concept. If, as anticipated, doomscrolling is prevalent and linked to critical outcomes such as political self-efficacy and psychological well-being, a validated measure will be useful for future research, such as studies that examine media use during crises, individual differences in responses to negative information, and effects of social media on outcomes ranging from emotional well-being to civic engagement.

Doomscrolling, like much passive social media use, has been described as immersive, tending to produce lengthy browsing sessions and lost time awareness, along with concentration and persistence (Nguyen, 2020). However, press accounts and social media users' self-descriptions suggest that doomscrolling is especially characterized by a compulsive, anxious interest in information that is timely and negative (Warzel, 2021; Watercutter, 2020). In these anecdotes, doomscrolling spirals and is self-reinforcing; users scan and approach negative post after negative post, whether from news sources, opinion leaders, or friends (Chen, 2020).

Perhaps due to the nature of social media newsfeeds, there is no terminal point at which a doomscrolling session naturally ends (Nguyen, 2020). Contemporary newsfeeds are typically nonchronological and are tailored to users' past scrolling behavior (Thorson et al., 2021). Feeds are both seemingly linear "scrolls" but also consist of dynamic comments sections, and links to other posts, profiles, and media.

Doomscrolling appears-based on these initial, suggestive descriptions-to be initiated by factors which would typically motivate seeking and attendance to negative news (e.g., vigilance, uncertainty, anxiety) but may be amplified by both individual factors (e.g., loss of self-control), technological affordances (endless newsfeeds and algorithmic recommendations), and social contexts (political upheaval or natural disasters). This reinforcement then (re)produces superficial scanning behaviors (cf. Matthes et al., 2020).

Conceptualization

Given these contours, we propose that doomscrolling is a specific instance of a media habit (Ghersetti & Westlund, 2018; LaRose, 2010), in which initially motivated, goal-driven behavior is incentivized into repetitive, automatic browsing cued by environmental factors (Schnauber-Stockmann & Naab, 2019). It potentially entails attention habits (to newsfeeds and negative information) and behavioral habits (scrolling through newsfeeds; Bayer & LaRose, 2018).

In this manuscript, we develop a self-report measure of doomscrolling, assess its reliability and structure, and validate it against related yet distinct concepts. Formally, we conceptualize doomscrolling as habitual, immersive scanning for timely negative information on social media newsfeeds.

Related Concepts

Causes

The doomscrolling phenomenon is not limited to, but became the most visible during, the particular environmental conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election. In those contexts, doomscrolling behaviors have been variably described by journalists and commentators as potentially caused by anxiety, uncertainty, low political self-efficacy, high political interest, and the constraints of social distancing (e.g., Chen, 2020; Nguyen, 2020; Watercutter, 2020). A lack of self-control has also been described as central to the doomscrolling experience (or the persistence of doomscrolling sessions) and has been implicated in other media habits (Tokunaga, 2017).

Individual Differences

Regarding traits, we propose based on previous personality-and-media findings (e.g., Horwood & Anglim, 2018; Huang, 2019) that doomscrolling is predicted by greater neuroticism, and to a lesser extent, conscientiousness and introversion. Agreeableness and openness are not expected to predict doomscrolling behavior. Given the nature of the content, we expect that cynicism, sensation-seeking, and negativity bias should be positively, and optimism negatively, linked to doomscrolling, but self-esteem should not relate to doomscrolling.

Media Behavior

More time on social media should relate to doomscrolling, as should smartphone reliance for social media, using more platforms, and using news-heavy platforms (Twitter and Facebook). Problematic internet and social media use (Caplan, 2010) should also correlate, as doomscrolling is a potentially disruptive behavior that involves tolerance of increasing doses.

Vigilance

Doomscrolling bears some similarities with online vigilance (Reinecke et al., 2018), which consists of both purposeful and habitual tendencies to think about, monitor, and react to digital communications. The Online Vigilance Scale (OVS) was differentiated from habit strength (for social network sites and smartphones) and fear of missing out (FOMO; Reinecke et al., 2018).

Given its particular focus on negative news, doomscrolling should differentiate from social media and online news habits. Likewise, it is narrower than both online vigilance (which is both active and passive, and attends to a broad range of messages) and a general surveillance motive for online news. Passive users (Frison & Eggermont, 2020) should be more prone to the endless, repetitive nature of doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling likely relates to some perverse form of FOMO (missing out on disaster), but not the typical focus on missing positive social experiences (e.g., not attending a party).

Well-Being

Doomscrolling is frequently described in popular accounts as having negative reciprocal relationships with-and thus correlations with-positive affect and well-being (Watercutter, 2020). Focusing on negative information can be detrimental to a sense of physical and mental well-being, yet may be sought out because of low or threatened states of well-being (Zhao & Zhou, 2020).

Three studies were used to develop and validate the proposed measure. All study materials are available online at https://osf.io/u9f6h/ (Sharma et al., 2020). The studies received ethical approval from the authors' institutional review board.

The 10-step scale development process described by Carpenter (2018) identifies the importance of a strong conceptual definition and iterative qualitative research as initial foundations for designing self-report measurements of communication phenomena. To generate a valid measure of doomscrolling, it was key to engage in an inductive analysis of conversations with social media users.

Participants and Procedure

To that end, we conducted a series of four online focus groups ( N = 10), from a convenience sample of American university students (70% women, 70% White) who frequent social media. The semi-structured question guide is available at https://osf.io/u9f6h/.

De-identified transcripts were analyzed with a grounded theory approach to map participant's experiences related to social media, negative news, and doomscrolling. Notably, none of the participants were initially familiar with the doomscrolling term, but several felt that the term described behavior by themselves, friends, or family. All three authors engaged in open coding and axial coding, compared themes and discussed as a group, and then further refined and organized subthemes and larger major themes.

Results

Emergent themes were organized into five major themes: (a) scope of concern, (b) what's going on, (c) drivers of use, (d) routines, and (e) experiences during scrolling.

In scope of concern, respondents described how their attention and involvement in negative news on social media was informed by its proximity: whether the news was relevant to self, friends, family, and the local environment, or whether it reflected larger national or global trends they wished to monitor. They also indicated that their sharing of content on social media was conditioned on its scope and relevance.

The theme what's going on reflected subthemes such as interest in big events, and monitoring and surveillance of important news. Participants frequently indicated that news would find them (cf. Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017), often through social and nonnewsy routes. As there were often too many events or stories to follow, participants were selective, content to feel generally "updated" on news unless a specific story had greater relevance or was being discussed widely by friends or famous personalities.

Drivers of use was a theme where participants described some of their primary motivations to use social media and consume timely news. They indicated that they were motivated to look for news on social media to stay updated on events that were close to home, such as topics affecting them or people they care about. They were also interested in following the latest trends, such as baking during the pandemic, and used social media to follow influential individuals who acted as secondary disseminators of information. Finally, many participants ascribed their excessive use of social media to the availability of extra time during the lockdown. This was characterized by short, compulsive, and frequent check-ins, as well as long, absorbing sessions.

Routines as a theme encapsulated the change in people's daily lives during the lockdown and its relationship with their news consumption and social media use. Due to more available unstructured time, participants admitted to developing unhealthy and dysfunctional habits, such as binge-watching and excessive scrolling. However, many also described how they slowly moved away from these habits and adopted a healthier routine, such as working on new hobbies or spending more time with their families. They tried to restructure their relationships with their smartphones as something to check first thing in the morning to catch up on news and avoid using at bedtime to not disrupt sleep time (cf. Eden et al., 2021).

Experiences during scrolling included strategic efforts to ignore or seek bad news, depending on the person and their needs. Participants often described a need to disengage from distressing news, and some indicated a relative disinterest in news. Most participants agreed that negative news was often repetitive, which limited its appeal. Yet, a common theme was excessive social media use in general. Participants described experiences of finding themselves using social media for longer than they felt they should, or that social media had come into conflict with other obligations.

Discussion

Overall, the focus groups provided a deeper insight into people's social media consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic and their relationship to doomscrolling as a phenomenon. Even though most participants initially asserted that they did not doomscroll and had never heard of it, many then described doing it in early stages of lockdown or described acquaintances who continued to doomscroll. This is an important finding that delineates the awareness of the term doomscrolling from the actual behavior. As a recent coinage, people may not be familiar with the term, but may engage in the practice.

These insights were applied to revise and rework an initially proposed set of 76 survey items (available at https://osf.io/u9f6h/). After revising this item bank, six domain experts (on digital media, news, and media psychology) were consulted on the content validity of the items, and further scale revision was undertaken.

After revising items based on focus group analysis and expert consultations, a revised bank of 80 candidate items was fielded as a survey on the crowdsourced research-participant platform Prolific.co. Its panelists are English-speakers throughout the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. Following Carpenter's (2018) guidance to use >5 cases per item for scale development exploratory factor analysis (EFA), 400 was set as the target sample size. Doomscrolling items were presented as 7-point Likert scales, across eight randomized pages with 10 randomized items per page.

Participants and Procedure

A total of N = 401 complete cases were collected. Participants hailed from 23 countries across five continents, with the largest representation from Poland (29.7%), Portugal (20.2%), U.K. (13.0%), and Italy (10.0%). The sample was 60.3% men, 39.2% women, and 0.5% nonbinary/neither. The mean age was 25.38 ( SD = 8.01, range 18-69) and the mean years of formal education was 15.78 ( SD = 2.75, range 11-25). The questionnaire was fielded on March 16, 2021 around 11:30 UTC.

Results

A planned EFA was conducted, using maximum likelihood extraction, direct oblimin rotation, and 100 iterations, to analyze the internal structure of the scale. Parallel analysis (O'Connor, 2000) was also planned to identify factors. Data met assumptions for sphericity with Bartlett's test, χ ² = 16,708.01, df = 3,160, p < .001, and sampling adequacy with the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test = .934.

Sixteen factors with eigenvalues >1 emerged, explaining 61.83% of the variance. Individual item loading on factors (25 items >.50, excluding two items with cross loading >.30) was poor, with (a) only two items on the first factor, (b) only three factors with three items or more, (c) reversed items on their own factor, (d) five factors with no items, and (e) three factors with negative loadings. Parallel analysis using 100 simulated datasets and a 95th percentile threshold for retaining factors found that the first eight factors yielded eigenvalues greater than those generated from random data.

Based on the parallel analysis, a new and unplanned EFA was conducted to identify an optimal set of items and their factors. The EFA was constrained to eight factors. Total variance explained was 44.68%. In this analysis, 29 items loaded >.50 on the first factor (Eigenvalue = 25.94), with no cross-loadings, and 20 of those items >.60. Four reversed items loaded on a second factor (Eigenvalue = 5.90), and the remaining six factors (Eigenvalues <5) were characterized by cross-loadings and negative loadings, such they were not meaningful or defensible. These results tentatively suggested a two-factor solution.

Reliability analysis was conducted on the item sets described above. The reliability for the full bank of 80 items was α = .941. The 25 items with loadings >.50 from the initial factor analysis were reliable, α = .865, despite an unclear factor structure. From the unplanned factor analysis based on parallel analysis results (constrained to eight factors), the 29 items that loaded >.50 on the first factor were reliable, α = .954, as were the 20 items with loadings >.60, α = .951. The four reversed items from the second factor were not reliable, α = .665. Moreover, the second factor correlated weakly with the first factor, r = .114, p = .02, so it was dropped, leaving a single-factor solution of 20 items.

Discussion

The findings from Study 2 suggest that doomscrolling is a coherent concept with a single dimension. Factor analysis allowed us to identify the most central items in our scale. A reduced 20-item scale (those items loading >.60) was then reassessed by four of the domain experts, again scrutinizing the content validity of items and their unidimensionality. Consensus identified five items that were either redundant or peripheral to the conceptual definition. Table 1 presents factor loadings and item-total correlations of 15 final scale items, α = .935, M = 2.80, SD = 1.18. This measure then proceeded to validation.

In the last step, a survey was conducted with Prolific panelists to confirm the final scale's structure and validate it against other concepts and measures. A target sample size of N = 500 was planned, to provide 80% power to detect r = .125 in correlational tests.

Participants and Procedure

A total of N = 502 complete cases were collected. Participants' residency resembled Study 2; they came from 27 countries across six continents, with the largest representation from Poland (29.1%), Portugal (18.3%), U.K. (12.2%), and Italy (7.4%). The sample was 58.2% men, 41.4% women, and 0.4% nonbinary. The mean age was 26.53 ( SD = 8.91, range 18-73) and the mean years of formal education were 15.79 ( SD = 2.84, range 5-29). The questionnaire was fielded on March 31, 2021 around 12:00 UTC.

Analytic Approach

Following Bowman and Goodboy (2020), we examined construct validity with regard to internal structure (global fit and residuals), convergent and discriminant validity, content validity (discussed above in Study 1 and Study 2), and assessed how the measure may be responded to and applied (which was also assessed by Study 1 and Study 2).

The internal structure of the doomscrolling scale was assessed with a planned confirmatory factor analysis using maximum likelihood extraction and specifying the dimensions (i.e., just one) seen in Study 2's EFA. Our model fit criteria for this novel scale were RMSEA ≤ .08, CFI ≥ .90, SRMR ≤ .08, item loadings should be >.60, and item residuals were examined for ±2.58 (cf. Bowman & Goodboy, 2020). If fit criteria were not met, we planned to proceed with correlational analyses of both the proposed-and a post hoc revised-version of the scale and subscales. If fit criteria were met, the proposed scale and subscales would be used.

Then, correlational analysis compared doomscrolling to other variables for convergent validity, expected r = .50-.70 (time on social media, number of social media platforms, problematic internet/social use, online vigilance, passive use, social media habit, online news habit, news surveillance motive); and discriminant validity, expected | r| = .00-.30 (big-five traits beside neuroticism, self-esteem, FOMO); and criterion validity with causes or outcomes, expected | r| = .30-.50, (self-control, anxiety, uncertainty, political self-efficacy, political interest, social distancing, smartphone reliance, neuroticism, optimism, cynicism, sensation-seeking, negativity bias, affect, well-being). The questionnaire is available at https://osf.io/u9f6h/.

Given limitations around media use self-reports, especially for mobile devices (Naab et al., 2019), validation with behavioral measures of the same latent concept is important. We included an in-survey behavioral measure of doomscrolling, embedding the website https://endlessdoomscroller.com (Grosser, 2021) and tracking how long participants engaged. Task duration should correlate with the doomscrolling scale, demonstrating concurrent validity.

Measures

Related concepts for tests of convergent validity are summarized in Table 2. They included self-reported daily hours spent on social media, the number of social media platforms used (checklist adapted from a list of most globally popular platforms; Kemp, 2020), and use of news-centric platforms (i.e., Twitter and Facebook). Scales included the Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale (GPIUS2; Caplan, 2010), Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS; Andreassen et al., 2012), and OVS (Reinecke et al., 2018). We adapted three items to measure passive social media use (Frison & Eggermont, 2020). The Self-Reported Behavioural Automaticity Index (SRBAI; Gardner et al., 2012) was adapted to measure habitual social media use and habitual online news use. News surveillance motive was measured with a scale from Eveland et al. (2003).

Theoretically relevant variables for tests of criterion validity are summarized in Table 3. Original single items measured uncertainty, social distancing, and smartphone reliance. Scales included the Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS; Tangney et al., 2004), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7; Spitzer et al., 2006), Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R; Scheier et al., 1994), Sensation Seeking 2 scale (SS2; Slater, 2003), Brief Risk-resilience Index for SCreening (BRISC; Williams et al., 2012), Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE; Diener et al., 2010), and World Health Organization-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5; Topp et al., 2015). We measured political self-efficacy with two items, and political interest with one item, in a larger five-item measure from Lane et al. (2019; it also has knowledge and participation items). We measured cynicism with three items from Miller et al. (1995), and neuroticism with the BFI-2-XS (Soto & John, 2017).

The BFI-2-XS was also used for the tests of discriminant validity, to measure openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and agreeableness (Soto & John, 2017). We included the Single-Item Self-Esteem scale (SISE; Robins et al., 2001) and the FOMO scale (Przybylski et al., 2013), all presented in Table 5.

Finally, for concurrent validity, the "Endless Doomscroller" webpage ( https://endlessdoomscroller.com) was embedded into a questionnaire page, coupled with a page timer. The webpage presents an unending list of ominous but vague headlines. Presumably, those predisposed to doomscrolling would be interested in scanning these headlines and take longer to proceed to the next page, providing a behavioral measure of doomscrolling. The seconds spent reading this page (range 3.92-1051.54, M = 72.69, SD = 95.90) were not normally distributed (Skew = 5.97, Kurtosis = 47.89), so an exploratory log base 10 transformation was also applied to the variable (range 0.59-3.02, M = 1.71, SD = 0.34). Both the raw and transformed variables are tested.

Results

The model fit of the 15-item doomscrolling scale was assessed with confirmatory factor analysis using maximum likelihood estimation in Jamovi 1.6.18. The items were fitted to a single factor, and the model showed modest fit which fell short of most of our thresholds, χ ²( df = 90) = 932, p < .001; RMSEA = .137, 90% CI [.129, .145]; CFI = .879; and SRMR = .048. Item loadings ranged from 1.05 to 1.26 and item covariance residuals ranged from 0.37 to 1.77. Omitting items did not improve fit. Examining modification indices, and adding 11 residual covariances to the model (between Items 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 2 and 3, 3 and 4, 3 and 5, 4 and 5, 6 and 7, 7 and 15, 9 and 10, 12 and 13, 14 and 15) improved fit to χ ²( df = 78) = 325, p < .001; RMSEA = .0796, 90% CI [.071, .089]; CFI = .964; and SRMR = .030. This confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is presented in Figure 1. Given that the corrective residual covariances were mostly for adjacent items, the covariances were likely due to presentation order rather than unincorporated multidimensionality.

As in Study 2, the 15-item doomscrolling scale was reliable, α = .960, ω = .962. The mean value of the scale items was computed to produce doomscrolling scores for each participant, M = 2.10, SD = 1.16. The distribution of scores, presented in Figure 2, is slightly right-skewed, Skewness = 1.25, Kurtosis = 0.91, with many participants scoring relatively low on the measure. Item descriptives appear in Table 5.

We explored relationships between doomscrolling and demographics. Doomscrolling was slightly more common among men ( M = 2.19, SD = 1.24) than women ( M = 1.97, SD = 1.05), Welch's t(483.873) = 2.21, p = .028, d = .195, and doomscrolling was negatively associated with age, r = −.147, p < .001, and education, r = −.131 p = .003. There were not significant differences in left-right ideology among doomscrollers, r = −.051, p = .079, but doomscrolling was positively associated with political knowledge, r = .103, p = .021, and political participation, r = .134, p = .003. Familiarity with the term "doomscrolling" had a small positive association with scores, F(2, 499) = 5.59, p = .016, η ² = .016, where scores were higher among those 13% who knew the term ( M = 2.41, SD = 1.22) than those 12% who were unsure ( M = 2.29, SD = 1.13) and those 75% who did not know it ( M = 2.01, SD = 1.15).

Convergent Validity

Correlational analyses were then used to assess how strongly doomscrolling was associated with similar concepts. Large correlations of .50-.70 were expected. A correlation greater than .70 would indicate that measures assessed the same, or overlapping, concepts. A correlation below .50 would indicate that the concepts were not as closely aligned as theorized.

Results are presented on the right side of Table 2. Two concepts showed the expected relationships with doomscrolling: online vigilance and social media addiction. Problematic internet use fell just short of the "large correlation" threshold. So, while doomscrolling resembles a broader motive to be vigilant in monitoring online media, as well as problematic patterns of excessive online media, it is a distinct concept. We should point out that the strongest correlations in our dataset were for online vigilance with problematic internet use (.690) and social media addiction (.643), and between problematic internet use and social media addiction (.620). Falling under the .70 threshold, our data show those validated measures reflect distinct concepts, yet they are more highly correlated with each other than with doomscrolling.

We observed moderate correlations of doomscrolling with passive social media use and habitual online news use. We also observed small correlations of doomscrolling with social media daily hours, number of social media platforms used, habitual social media use, and news surveillance motive. These links were smaller than expected. And, surprisingly, we saw no association between doomscrolling and use (vs. no use) of news-centric platforms Twitter and Facebook.

Criterion Validity

The next set of validation tests assessed how doomscrolling related to concepts that we expected to influence or be influenced by doomscrolling. Moderate correlations of |.30-.50| were anticipated, and results appear in the right side of Table 3. Only one correlation fell in the expected range, for anxiety. Individuals reporting more generalized anxiety in the previous 2 weeks had higher doomscrolling scores.

Small positive correlations were seen between doomscrolling and political interest, neuroticism, cynicism, sensation-seeking, and negativity bias. Self-control and positive affect were negatively correlated with doomscrolling, as expected (albeit to a less degree).

Unexpectedly, no links were seen between doomscrolling and uncertainty, political self-efficacy, social distancing, smartphone reliance, optimism, or well-being.

Discriminant Validity

Small to no correlations were expected between doomscrolling and the variables in Table 4. This was supported, with one exception: A moderately sized positive correlation was seen with FOMO. A small negative association with conscientiousness was evident. Otherwise, no ties were seen with openness, extroversion, agreeableness, or self-esteem.

Concurrent Validity

The doomscrolling scale was not associated with seconds spent on the behavioral task (time spent reading headlines), neither the raw scores r = −.007, p = .874, nor the transformed scores, r = −.058, p = .193. Exploratory correlations tested whether the behavioral measure was predicted by any of the most similar concepts to doomscrolling (i.e., the variables from the convergent validity tests). Only news surveillance motives predicted browsing time, for raw scores r = .123, p = .006, and transformed scores, r = .091, p = .042.

Short Form

An exploratory set of analyses were also conducted to identify a short-form version of the doomscrolling scale. The 15 items in the doomscrolling scale were assessed for (a) highest factor loadings, (b) highest content validity, and (c) least skew and kurtosis ( Table 5). Items ranking in the top third of items in two or more of those criteria were selected. This yielded a four-item doomscrolling scale short-form, α = .846, M = 2.23, SD = 1.05, Skew = 1.05, Kurtosis = 0.48, which performed very similarly to the long form in validity tests.

Discussion

Study 3 assessed the dimensionality of the 15-item scale developed in Study 2. It confirmed the measure's unidimensional structure, and showed generally good fit. Correlational tests indicated that doomscrolling was a unique concept, and that it was consistently (with a few exceptions) associated with other concepts as expected, providing support for its validity. Finally, a four-item short-form scale was developed and tested.

Doomscrolling is a particular concept, characterized by compulsive browsing on social media newsfeeds with an obsessive focus on negative and timely news. Based on our three studies, doomscrolling emerges as a result of wanting to stay updated with the latest news, especially negative news, and evolves into a compulsive, excessive scrolling through newsfeeds. Users are motivated to stay on top of news that would potentially impact themselves and people close to them, and they subsequently become drawn into compulsive scrolling on online media platforms for negative information.

The development of our scale is initial evidence that doomscrolling is a distinctive phenomenon, an unusual but important media habit. Our three studies ultimately developed a 15-item scale to measure doomscrolling. The scale shows excellent reliability, has good validity, and is easy to use. The doomscrolling concept, as measured by our scale, is distinct from related concepts, and has small to moderate relationships with a variety of relevant trait, state, media use, political, and demographic variables.

Regarding the scale's validity, Study 3 provided partial evidence of convergent validity, criterion, and discriminant validity of the doomscrolling scale. Doomscrolling resembles online vigilance, problematic internet/social media use, and FOMO, with moderate to high associations. It had small to moderate positive links to the extent of social media use in general, as well as more specific tendencies such as passive use, habitual use, and news surveillance. Doomscrolling had a moderate, positive relationship with anxiety, and it had small, positive relationships with political interest, neuroticism, cynicism, sensation-seeking, and negativity bias. Moreover, doomscrolling had small, negative relationships with conscientiousness, self-control, and positive affect. On the other hand, there was no connection with optimism or political self-efficacy, uncertainty, self-esteem, social distancing, or smartphone reliance. Although doomscrolling had a small, negative relationship with positive emotion, it was unrelated to a broader measure of psychological well-being. Concurrent validity could not be established with a behavioral measure, but a lack of correlations with other concepts suggest that the behavioral measure (rather than the scale) was lacking in validity.

Doomscrolling was relatively uncommon (Study 2, M = 2.80, SD = 1.18, range 1.00-6.53; Study 3, M = 2.10, SD = 1.16, range 1.00-6.40) compared to other media habits or problems, as it had a lower standardized mean than other measures and its right-skewed distribution is not normal. This is in contrast to reasonably normal distributions (Skew < |1|, Kurtosis < |1|) for online vigilance, social media addiction, problematic internet use, FOMO, habits, and passive use. The news surveillance motive scale, however, was left-skewed and leptokurtic (Skew = −1.108, Kurtosis = 1.73). Men and younger adults showed slightly more doomscrolling than women and older adults, but there were not ideological differences.

Theoretical and Practical Implications

The relationships documented in this research, as well as the empirical documentation of the doomscrolling experience, potentially contribute to several bodies of knowledge on how social media users engage with continuous streams of content, including: media habits (Bayer & LaRose, 2018; Schnauber-Stockmann & Naab, 2019), the permanently online, permanently connected paradigm (Freytag et al., 2021), news-seeking and scanning (Lewis, 2017), user responses to algorithmically curated feeds (Swart, 2021; Thorson et al., 2021), problematic forms of online media use (Cheng et al., 2021; Harris et al., 2020), self-control of digital media use (Du et al., 2019), and effects on well-being (Erfani & Abedin, 2018; Harris et al., 2020). Our validation tests indicate that doomscrolling is a habitual pattern of media use, connected to motives for news surveillance and online vigilance, but that it is a unique pattern (and mindset) of scanning social media newsfeeds. Like other habits, it has origins in motivated behaviors (e.g., seeking out information during a crisis) but becomes automatic and unintentional over time (e.g., repetitive scanning of newsfeeds). Indeed, lower levels of self-control are implicated in the doomscrolling experience. Although likely motivated by anxiety, it may also produce more anxiety (but this dynamic remains untested).

Doomscrolling may not be an artifact of the COVID-19 era (as it was unrelated to social distancing or uncertainty), but rather a habit developed in response to how global and local crises unfold on unending and targeted newsfeeds. The strong connection to social media addiction and generalized problematic internet use suggests that doomscrolling is certainly an excessive behavior, and likely dysfunctional. It is tied to less positive, and more negative, levels of emotional experience, yet our cross-sectional data show no ties to psychological well-being (as measured by the WHO-5). Similarly, a test of self-reported online vigilance and logged smartphone behavior found little to no effects of vigilant use on well-being indicators (Johannes et al., 2021). Our study places doomscrolling as another piece of the puzzle in the overall permanently online, permanently connected experience (Vorderer et al., 2017), as research continues to paint a more complete picture of how humans experience digital media (as these media and their contents constantly evolve).

This study also has practical implications. First, the findings from this study show that doomscrolling appears to be a concrete experience that afflicts some users of multiple social media platforms. Our measure allows researchers (but also users and practitioners) to take inventory of an individual's doomscrolling behavior. More awareness of the doomscrolling phenomenon may benefit users by bringing awareness to self-regulation strategies or other ways to mitigate excessive use of negatively valenced media, such as consuming mobile news in intentionally smaller portions (Molyneux, 2018). Understanding one's media habits can help people to better manage their mental health and overall well-being (Jöckel & Wilhelm, 2018).

Second, the study findings suggest those who manage news organizations and social media news algorithms should spend more time thinking about how to balance negative with positive news, especially for those individuals who fixate and become immersed in distressing or depressing content. As reported in our Study 1, users are often aware of excessive social media use and may take proactive measures to limit it. Users also find the repetitive nature of negative news to be unappealing and wish to limit consumption of distressing news. As awareness around doomscrolling grows, users might become wary of news outlets and social media accounts that post disproportionately negative content. Individuals who experience negative outcomes from doomscrolling may then develop news avoidance techniques to protect their well-being, a finding echoed by recent surveys on COVID-19 information overload, well-being, and avoidance (de Bruin et al., 2021; Jain, 2021).

Newsroom and platform routines and guidelines for covering breaking news and high-casualty events are also consequential for preventing the in-the-moment spread of misinformation or distortion in coverage (Kaufman et al., 2020; Levin & Wiest, 2018; WNYC, 2013) that could exacerbate doomscrolling (cf. Jones et al., 2017). Moreover, social media platforms may help users to monitor and adjust their doomscrolling behavior by actively encouraging users to access quantifiable data that track their online activity.

Limitations and Future Directions

This study, like any other, has its limitations. First of all, doomscrolling may be conditioned on social situations, such the COVID-19 pandemic and its social distancing. We originally hoped to collect data in the aftermath of the U.S presidential election. Precise moments of crisis can be hard to predict (e.g., the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol) for fielding data collection. Instead, our plan to collect data on the Prolific platform did allow us to survey mostly Europeans during a period of time (March 2021) when news about shutdowns and vaccine rollouts or pauses were especially salient for those populations. There may be cross-cultural differences in doomscrolling, not only in specific contexts such as COVID-19 but more persistently over time. A strength of the present project and resulting measure is that they are not as U.S.-centric as are so many scale development projects in media and technology research. However, a more systematic comparison of cultural, social, and political contexts would be needed to allow any initial assessment of cross-cultural differences. These investigations should also examine issues of social power, oppression, risk, and stigma. For example, within the U.S. context, data from the COVID-19 pandemic show that people with disabilities were more actively engaged with coronavirus-related news (Dobransky & Hargittai, 2021), and Asian Americans experienced a negative effect of media use on subjective well-being whereas White Americans did not (Quintero Johnson et al., 2021).

For Study 1, the size of focus groups was smaller than planned. Although we were able to capture nuances of social media use and news consumption in a way that informed our item bank, the limited number and diversity of participants may have inhibited a more multifaceted conceptualization of doomscrolling. Future works can employ more extensive qualitative methods to collect rich data about doomscrolling experiences across people and social groups. For example, a recently published article reports a large-scale qualitative study of Norwegian media users in 2020 (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021). Their findings echo the importance of news avoidance, alongside feelings of exhaustion, anxiety, and monitoring in relation to news.

Next, self-reporting of media habits is often complicated and may not fully capture the real-world experience. For instance, many participants in the Study 1 focus groups claimed to be "addicted" to their phones or certain social media platforms. However, when asked about doomscrolling specifically, they were not aware of the expression. Doomscrolling is a recently coined term, and the language and frames used by publics may play a role in how they think and talk about their own experiences online, but also how they are able to accurately self-report their experiences to researchers. As addiction to smartphones or a particular social media platform is often used as a lay metaphor for any excessive use (Essig, 2012), social media users might latch onto a term such as doomscrolling to explain experiences that actually reflect other concepts such as vigilance or fatigue. However, we did find in Study 3 that familiarity with the term doomscrolling only had a modest link to self-reported scores on our scale. Doomscrollers may not have a word to label their behavior, or those familiar with the concept may never experience it themselves. Future work can also assess how the subjective experience of doomscrolling relates to behavioral data extracted from smartphones or applications (cf. Johannes et al., 2021).

Our scale only identified a single factor of doomscrolling. This could reflect the reality of the concept, or could be influenced by the lack of a priori ideas about dimensions in our item bank. Further testing, and comparisons to other doomscrolling studies currently being fielded or reviewed (e.g., Price et al., 2021) may provide more information about the dimensionality (or unidimensionality) of doomscrolling. At 15 items, our scale is slightly long for a unidimensional measure, yet it has good content validity. We also recommend our four-item short form scale to researchers with limited questionnaire space.

Overall, our novel doomscrolling scale can be used in future studies to see its effects on well-being and coping in different environmental contexts. To date, a peer-reviewed commentary has speculated (without data) about the causes and effects of doomscrolling, including anxiety, stress, uncertainty, confirmation bias, and self-control (Anand et al., 2020). An autoethnography of COVID-19 lockdown reflected on the repetition of doomscrolling, the persistence to keep scanning for more tragedy, and the effort required to stop (Markham, 2021). Price et al. (2021) purported to look at the negative association between doomscrolling and depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they might be stronger for individuals with clinically significant past traumatic experiences. However, a proxy measure was used, of daily exposure to pandemic-related social media (dichotomous for each day, summed over 30 days). Not only does that measure not assess the duration and quality of exposure, but also it neglects the actual subjective state of doomscrolling. In contrast, we believe that the scale developed in our study can prove beneficial in future studies such as these by distinguishing doomscrolling as a concept from broader media exposure or other online media habits. Furthermore, our valid doomscrolling scale will allow researchers to investigate the effects of-and on-mental health variables as well as interactions with existing individual differences and conditions.

Future studies should also explore the relationships between a platform's algorithmic recommendations, affordances, user's algorithmic awareness, and doomscrolling. Previous research has argued that people's awareness of algorithmic curation used by social media is limited, but that experience with and literacy about algorithmic filtering can affect user attitudes and usage of the platform (Beer, 2017; Swart, 2021). Hence, it is worth exploring how algorithmic awareness (Zarouali et al., 2021) can have a mitigating effect on doomscrolling.

Finally, social media are broadly operationalized in the study, and the scale as applied here did not differentiate one platform from another. Each platform has different affordances and differs in the representation of content, differences which are not addressed in this study. It would be beneficial to see how doomscrolling varies across social media platforms and if it is more prevalent (or takes different forms) on any one kind of social media site. Likewise, multitasking versus monotasking may factor into doomscrolling and its effects (Freytag et al., 2021).

The three studies reported here provide evidence that doomscrolling, although not as prevalent as some media reports would suggest, is a distinct concept. Our reliable and valid measure is useful for assessing situations where people develop the habit of persistently seeking out negative information. We believe that this scale may be included either as a moderator, mediator, or dependent variable to help to explain people's social media news selections, psychological experiences during crises, and the effects of news and social media on an array of outcomes. In conclusion, the doomscrolling scale provides a robust foundation for future studies that aim to make sense of people's obsessive focus on negative online news.
https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000059.supp

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The Dark at the End of the Tunnel: Doomscrolling on Social Media Newsfeeds

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Volume 3, Issue 1: Spring 2022. Special Collection: Technology in a Time of Social Distancing. DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000059

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https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political-war-memes-disinformation/

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Memes come off as a joke, but some people are starting to see them as the serious threat they are.

In October 2016, a friend of mine learned that one of his wedding photos had made its way into a post on a right-wing message board. The picture had been doctored to look like an ad for Hillary Clinton's campaign, and appeared to endorse the idea of drafting women into the military. A mutual friend of ours found the image first and sent him a message: "Ummm, I saw this on Reddit, did you make this?"

This was the first my friend had heard of it. He hadn't agreed to the use of his image, which was apparently taken from his online wedding album. But he also felt there was nothing he could do to stop it.

So rather than poke the trolls by complaining, he ignored it and went on with his life. Most of his friends had a laugh at the fake ad, but I saw a huge problem. As a researcher of media manipulation and disinformation, I understood right away that my friend had become cannon fodder in a "meme war"-the use of slogans, images, and video on social media for political purposes, often employing disinformation and half-truths.

While today we tend to think of memes as funny images online, Richard Dawkins coined the term back in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene, where he described how culture is transmitted through generations. In his definition, memes are "units of culture" spread through the diffusion of ideas. Memes are particularly salient online because the internet crystallizes them as artifacts of communication and accelerates their distribution through subcultures.

Importantly, as memes are shared they shed the context of their creation, along with their authorship. Unmoored from the trappings of an author's reputation or intention, they become the collective property of the culture. As such, memes take on a life of their own, and no one has to answer for transgressive or hateful ideas.

And while a lot of people think of memes as harmless entertainment-funny, snarky comments on current events-we're far beyond that now. Meme wars are a consistent feature of our politics, and they're not just being used by internet trolls or some bored kids in the basement, but by governments, political candidates, and activists across the globe. Russia used memes and other social-media tricks to influence the US election in 2016, using a troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency to seed pro-Trump and anti-Clinton content across various online platforms. Both sides in territorial conflicts like those between Hong Kong and China, Gaza and Israel, and India and Pakistan are using memes and viral propaganda to sway both local and international sentiment.

In 2007, for example, as he was campaigning for president, John McCain jokingly started to sing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' popular song "Barbara Ann." McCain, an Iran hawk, was talking up a possible war using the well-worn tactic of humor and familiarity: easy to dismiss as a joke, yet serving as a scary reminder of US military power. But it became a political liability for him. The slogan was picked up by civilian meme-makers, who spread and adapted it until it went viral. His opponent, Barack Obama, in essence got unpaid support from people who were better at creating persuasive content than his own campaign staff.

The viral success of memes has led governments to try imitating the genre in their propaganda. These campaigns are often aimed at the young, like the US Army's social-media-focused "Warriors Wanted" program, or the British Army campaign that borrows the visual language of century-old recruiting posters to make fun of millennial stereotypes. These drew ridicule when they were launched earlier this year, but they did boost recruitment.

However, using memes this way misses the point entirely. As mentioned, great memes are authorless. They move about the culture without attribution.

Much more authentic military meme campaigns are coming from soldiers themselves, such as the memes referencing the bungling idiot known simply as "Carl." US service members and veterans run websites that host jokes and images detailing the reality of military life. Yet these serve a purpose not so different from that of official propaganda. They often feature heavily armed soldiers and serve to highlight, even in jokes, the tremendous destructive capacity of the armed forces. In turn, such memes have been turned into commercial marketing campaigns, such as one for the veteran-owned clothing company Valhalla Wear.

My friend's picture was appropriated for a memetic operation that aimed to associate Hillary Clinton with a revival of the draft.

Recognizing this power of memes generated by ordinary people to serve a state's propaganda narrative, in 2005 a Marine Corps major named Michael Prosser wrote a master's thesis titled "Memetics-A Growth Industry in US Military Operations," in which he called for the formation of a meme warfare center that would enroll people to produce and share memes as a way of swaying public opinion.

Prosser's idea didn't come to fruition, but the US government did come to recognize memetics as a threat. Beginning in 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency offered $42 million in grants for research into what it called "social media in strategic communications," with the hope that the government could detect "purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation" and create countermessaging to fight it.

Yet that research didn't prepare DARPA for Russia's 2016 disinformation campaign. Its extent was uncovered only by reporters and academics. That revealed a fatal flaw in national security: foreign agents are nearly impossible to detect when they hide within the civilian population. Unless social-media companies cooperate with the state to monitor attacks, this tactic remains in play.

My friend's wedding photo provides a good illustration of how something as seemingly trivial as a meme can be turned into a powerful political weapon. In 2016, a Reddit message board, r/The_Donald, was a well-known meme factory for all things Trump. Imagery and sloganeering were beta-tested and refined there before being deployed by swarms of accounts on social-media platforms. Famous viral slogans launched from The_Donald included those having to do with "Pizzagate" and the Seth Rich murder conspiracy.

My friend's picture was appropriated for a memetic warfare operation called #DraftMyWife or #DraftOurDaughters, which aimed to falsely associate Hillary Clinton with a revival of the draft. The strategy was simple: the perpetrators took imagery from Clinton's official digital campaign materials, as well as pictures online like my friend's, and altered them to make it look as if Clinton would draft women into the military if she became president. Someone who saw one of these fake campaign ads and then searched online would find that Clinton had in fact spoken in June 2016 in support of a bill that included a provision making women eligible to be drafted-but only in case of a national emergency. The bill was passed, but it was later changed to remove that requirement. This is what made #DraftMyWife sneaky-it was based on a kernel of truth.

Memes like this often use a process called "trading up the chain," pioneered by media entrepreneur Ryan Holiday, who describes the method in his book Trust Me, I'm Lying. Campaigns begin with posts in blogs or other news outlets with low standards. If all goes well, somebody notable will inadvertently spread the disinformation by tweet, which then leads to coverage in bigger and more reputable outlets. #DraftMyWife was outed fairly early on as a hoax and got debunked in the Washington Post, the Guardian, and elsewhere. The problem is, taking the trouble to correct disinformation campaigns like these can satisfy the goal of spreading the meme as far as possible-a process called amplification.

Memes online make hoaxes and psychological operations easy to pull off on an international scale. We should view them as a serious threat. The good news is that a bill in the works in the US Congress would form a national commission to assess the threat posed by foreign and domestic actors manipulating social media to cause harm.

Just focusing on those actors misses the point, though, for much the same reason those meme-inspired military recruiting campaigns missed the point. Memetic warfare works only if those waging it can rely on massive public participation to spread the memes and obscure their original authors. So rather than going after the meme creators, politicians and institutions looking to counter meme war might do better to strengthen the institutions that create and distribute reliable information-the media, academia, nonpartisan government agencies, and so on-while US cyber-defense works with the platform companies to root out influence operations.

And if that doesn't work, blame Carl.

Joan Donovan leads the Technology and Social Change Research Project in the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

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How memes got weaponized: A short history

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In October 2016, a friend of mine learned that one of his wedding photos had made its way into a post on a right-wing message board. The picture had been doctored to look like an ad for Hillary Clinton's campaign, and appeared to endorse the idea of drafting women into the military.

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Webinars on demand. Webinars to help reporters and the wider public understand and manage misinformation. See "Information sharing for communities".

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https://firstdraftnews.org/webinars/

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Watch all of our previous webinars on demand

We regularly host webinars to help reporters and the wider public understand and manage misinformation. They are full of friendly faces, intelligent insights and pearls of wisdom to keep you on the front foot when it comes to false rumors and misleading information.

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We regularly host webinars to help reporters and the wider public understand and manage misinformation. They are full of friendly faces, intelligent insights and pearls of wisdom to keep you on the front foot when it comes to false rumors and misleading information.

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https://www.businessinsider.com/influencer-marketing-report?r=AU&IR=T

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The pandemic sped up influencer marketing's trend toward "unfiltered" or less-scripted content, as well as the rise of TikTok and popularity of "everyday influencers."

Brands are increasingly tapping micro- and nanoinfluencers, kidfluencers, gaming influencers, and virtual influencers for marketing opportunities.

Do you work in the Advertising, Media & Marketing industry? Get business insights on the latest tech innovations, market trends, and your competitors with data-driven research.

The pandemic has disrupted the influencer marketing industry. But it's not time to completely throw out the rulebook, as most of the changes are accelerations of pre-existing trends, rather than transformative shifts in the market.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing involves a celebrity or other public figure endorsing a product or service.

Partnering with social media influencers is already familiar to many brands, but the market is undergoing constant change: Brands must continually evolve their strategies accordingly. The market is rapidly expanding as influencer types have proliferated, with influencers filling every conceivable niche and sub-niche interest. Each of these types offer distinct benefits and trade-offs for brands. In addition to celebrities with massive followings like Kim Kardashian West and Kylie Jenner, brands are increasingly tapping other key influencer types, including micro- and nanoinfluencers, kidfluencers, gaming influencers, and virtual (computer-generated) influencers.

Now, the pandemic has sped up changes that were already underway, such as the trend toward "unfiltered" or less-scripted content, the rise of TikTok and the popularity of "everyday influencers." Industries like finance that hadn't invested heavily in the tactic earlier are also learning to navigate the space. And as e-commerce and social media converge, influencers will become increasingly vital intermediaries, helping to connect brands with consumers on social media in highly resonant, authentic ways that can deliver immediate returns.

Now, the pandemic has sped up changes that were already underway, such as the trend toward "unfiltered" or less-scripted content, the rise of TikTok and the popularity of "everyday influencers."

Influencer Marketing Spend

As people spend more time on social media, they're also likely to spend at least some of that time interacting with influencers. According to a May 2020 GlobalWebIndex survey, 96% of US and UK consumers who followed influencers were engaging with them more or to the same extent as before the coronavirus outbreak.

Despite the rise in social media usage, the coronavirus pandemic-related economic downturn has impacted marketing budgets across the board. In a May 2020 survey, Linqia asked US marketers how COVID-19 had changed their planned influencer marketing budgets for Q2-and 41% said their budget had decreased.
Like what you're reading? Click here to learn more about Insider Intelligence's leading Advertising, Media, and Marketing research.
Influencer Marketing Research, Stats & Facts

As of May 2020, US and UK consumers who followed influencers were most interested in influencer content that entertained or helped them with their daily lives amid the pandemic.

There are two primary ways of categorizing influencers: reach and niche.

Reach. As a general rule, targeted reach, cost-effectiveness, engagement, authenticity, and accessibility all go up as follower count goes down.

Niche. Brands can leverage relevant niche influencers to more intentionally target audiences.

Before pursuing a partnership, brands and influencers alike should ensure brand fit, meaning that an influencer is aligned with the brand and product.

Brands should develop a streamlined but robust network of high-quality influencers to diversify their bets.

Brands are likely to increasingly prioritize longer-term partnerships with fewer, more authentic influencers.

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Influencer Marketing: Social media influencer market stats and research for 2022

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Insider Intelligence explores the influencer marketing industry, how it is maturing, and how brands can effectively navigate a changing and expanding market.

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https://www.nsla.org.au/resources/topic/digital-citizenship?page=0

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https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.201199

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1. Introduction

The first human infection with the SARS CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Within three months, the virus spread across the globe igniting a global public health emergency. As of September 2020, there have been over 25 million cases worldwide and more than 800 000 people have died from the virus [ 1]. Scholars increasingly recognize that in order to contain the spread of the virus, insights from the social and behavioural sciences play an important role, especially when it comes to the spread of misinformation about the virus [ 2]. Indeed, misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic is a serious threat to both public health and international relations, ranging from the proliferation of damaging health advice, such as ingesting bleach, to politically motivated conspiracies about where the virus originated from. In fact, the proliferation of false and misleading information about the virus, how it spreads, how to cure it and who is 'behind' it, has prompted the World Health Organization to warn of an ongoing 'infodemic' [ 3, 4]. For example, false conspiracy theories about 5G masts causing or exacerbating COVID-19 symptoms have led to people setting mobile phone masts ablaze, endangering lives and property [ 5, 6].

Prior research on the spread of misinformation in general has mostly been confined to the context of the 2016 US presidential election, finding that exposure to fake news was fairly limited in the population [ 7- 10]. Similarly, large-scale analyses of Facebook data in the context of vaccine hesitancy also find that anti-vaccination groups are currently in the minority. However, the projected growth in anti-vaccination views is expected to dominate online discourse within a decade without intervention [ 11]. In the context of COVID-19, a recent analysis of the most viewed coronavirus YouTube videos found that over 25% of the top videos contained misleading information and totalled 62 million views worldwide [ 12]. There is also evidence to suggest that exposure to misinformation about the virus may be more common than often assumed. For example, a poll by Ofcom in the UK found that almost half (46%) of the British population report exposure to fake news about the coronavirus [ 13]. In particular, among those exposed, nearly two-thirds (66%) report seeing it on a daily basis, which is problematic as repeated exposure is known to increase belief in fake news [ 14].

The proliferation of misinformation online, along with its real-life adverse effects on society and public health [ 15], has prompted researchers to investigate what may explain people's belief in false information and conspiracy theories. In terms of demographics, being older has generally been associated with higher susceptibility to misinformation [ 7, 9, 10]. Some researchers have reported an association between self-reported minority status and belief in conspiracy theories [ 16, 17]. Van Prooijen et al. [ 17], for example, argue that 'feelings of deprivation lead marginalized minority members to perceive the social and political system as rigged, stimulating belief in both identity-relevant and irrelevant conspiracy theories'. In addition, researchers have noted several important motivational drivers as predictors of belief in misinformation: lower trust in science and scientists [ 18- 21], lower trust in journalists and the mainstream media [ 22], lower trust in government [ 23- 25], as well as the role of political ideology, specifically conservatism [ 7, 26- 30].

In addition to these motivational factors, a growing literature has explored the role of 'cognition' in susceptibility to misinformation. Overall, a large literature finds that factors such as education [ 31, 32], analytical thinking, numeracy skills, 'bullshit receptivity' and 'intuitive' versus 'reflective' thinking styles (often assessed via the cognitive reflection test) appear to play a consistent and key role in processing misinformation [ 10, 14, 33- 39]. Following prior research [ 17], we included numeracy in the current study. Numeracy skills are defined as the broad ability to process basic numerical concepts and are often related to improved accuracy in judgement and decision-making across a wide range of domains [ 38].

Aside from these more general predictors, recent research has evaluated public belief in and susceptibility to misinformation specifically about COVID-19 [ 27, 39- 42]. A recent study by Uscinski et al. [ 41] found that beliefs in conspiracies about the virus are associated with a propensity to reject information from expert authorities, raising concerns about the potential for popular conspiracy theories to reduce people's willingness to comply with public health guidance. Accordingly, some studies have started to explore the association between belief in COVID-19 conspiracies and compliance with public health guidance [ 21, 40, 43]. Others have explored people's level of trust in politicians' and the WHO's approach to tackling the pandemic [ 27, 41] and the role of receiving information from social media and the WHO in shaping people's beliefs about the virus [ 43]. Importantly, scholars have found that COVID-19 conspiracies form a 'monological belief system', where belief in one conspiracy about the virus predicts belief in others [ 44, 45].

However, although both scientific and public interest in misinformation about COVID-19 are at a peak, no comprehensive study has yet been published that systematically examines belief in misinformation about the virus, and which of the above-mentioned factors are most critical in shaping such beliefs. In addition, while some research is available on the relation between COVID-19 misinformation and key public health behaviours [ 21, 40], existing studies have been criticized for using low-quality convenience samples [ 46] and a systematic evaluation of how false beliefs about the virus can affect vaccination-related behaviours and compliance with health guidance measures is currently lacking [ 47]. This is especially important considering that most research on misinformation has been confined to the USA, which limits the generalizability of prior findings [ 26].

Accordingly, to assess belief in misinformation and its determinants in a diverse set of countries that have experienced different death rates and government responses to the pandemic, we explore susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation in five countries around the world: the UK, Ireland, Spain, the USA and Mexico. As detailed above, we include a broad array of known potential predictors of potential susceptibility to misinformation (both in general and about COVID-19 specifically), to conduct the first comprehensive, cross-cultural analysis of COVID-19 misinformation. Additionally, in order to examine the effects of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour, we look at two measures that are of key importance to the success of a country's approach to tackling the crisis. First, we examine the effect of higher belief in misinformation about COVID-19 on people's willingness to get vaccinated against the disease and to recommend vulnerable friends and family members to get vaccinated [ 40]. Second, we explore how belief in COVID-19 misinformation influences the degree of current compliance with public health guidance such as wearing a mask in public [ 39]. Our goal was not to build an exhaustive predictive model for compliance with public health guidance; rather, we sought to explore whether susceptibility to misinformation is a significant predictor of compliance with health guidance measures when controlling for other basic factors such as age, gender, education and political ideology.

2. Material and methods

2.1. Sample and procedure

In this study, we investigate susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation and its influence on key health-related behaviours in large national surveys in Ireland ( n = 700), the USA ( n = 700), Spain ( n= 700) and Mexico ( n= 700), conducted between mid-April and early May of 2020, and two separate surveys in the UK ( n = 1050 and n= 1150). The first UK study was conducted on 14 April, and the second on 11 May 2020, in order to be able to evaluate whether the observed effects would remain constant over time. Participants were recruited as part of a series of large-scale international survey studies about COVID-19. All samples were balanced on national quotas for age and gender and obtained from Respondi, an ISO-certified panel provider of digital online data for public opinion research. Sampling continued until the quotas were filled, and the 'force response' option in Qualtrics was used to ensure complete cases for all key measures. Since the number of missing values for all measures was very low (see electronic supplementary material, table S2), we excluded missing values from the analyses. Depending on the platform and length of the survey, respondents were paid between £1.00 and £1.90 for a 20-25 minute survey. Electronic supplementary material, table S2 lists the samples' demographic composition by country.

2.2. Measures

The measures used in this study are based on previous research about common predictors of belief in conspiracy theories and misinformation in general [ 10, 16, 17, 25, 36, 39, 48], as well as specifically about COVID-19 [ 23, 27, 39, 40, 43], as reviewed in the Introduction section. In terms of general predictors, participants were asked to indicate their age, gender (male, female, other or prefer not to answer), education level (1-6, 1 being 'no education above age 16' and 6 being 'doctorate'), political ideology (1-7, 1 being 'very left wing/liberal' and 7 being 'very right wing/conservative'), trust in the government, scientists and journalists (all 1-5, 1 being 'not at all' and 5 being 'very much') and 'Do you consider yourself to be part of a minority group within the country you are currently living in?' This question was phrased in this way to permit individuals who felt they were part of a minority group of any kind (e.g. gender, age and ideology) to answer in the affirmative. We also measured participants' numeracy level, which was calculated as the total score on three different numeracy tests: the three-item Schwartz test [ 49], the adaptive three-item Berlin test [ 50] and the answer to the following question: 'What represents the highest chance of something happening: 1 in 10, 1 in 1000, or 1 in 100' (modified from item 1 of Wright et al. [ 51]). By including a broad array of numeracy questions, we sought to capture the ability of individuals to understand quantitative information in a general sense [ 38], which is fairly independent of intelligence and a good proxy for critical thinking [ 37, 38].

Specifically with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, participants were asked to what extent they comply with public health guidance ('Which of the following steps, if any, have you taken in the last month to prepare for the possibility of many cases of the coronavirus/COVID-19 in your community?'; answers included a range of options, including washing your hands, using hand sanitizer, wearing a face mask and staying at home from work). We then summed the amount of health preventative behaviours reported by each participant (out of 11), with higher scores representing higher compliance. We also asked participants whether they would get vaccinated against COVID-19 if a vaccine were to become available (yes/no); whether they would recommend their vulnerable friends to get vaccinated against COVID-19 (yes/no); trust in politicians' and the World Health Organization's handling of the crisis (1-7, 1 being 'not at all' and 7 being 'very much'); their risk perception about COVID-19 (for which we used the six-item COVID-19 risk perception index developed by Dryhurst et al. [ 52]) and whether they have come across information about COVID-19 from the WHO and social media (both yes/no). Electronic supplementary material, table S2 shows the descriptive statistics for each of these measures by country. Electronic supplementary material, table S3 provides a detailed overview of the exact wording for all variables and items used.

To measure participants' belief in misinformation about COVID-19, we presented them with nine statements about the virus, six of which represent common examples of health-related and political misinformation (e.g. '5G networks may be making us more susceptible to the coronavirus' and 'Gargling salt water or lemon juice reduces the risk of infection from Coronavirus'), two of which were common factual statements (e.g. 'People with diabetes are at higher risk of complications from coronavirus') and one of which was not false but ambiguous (Taking ibuprofen when you are infected could make your symptoms worse). The false claims were based on the World Health Organization's 'Mythbusters' page [ 55]. Electronic supplementary material, table S1 shows the exact wording of all items in full.

Following prior studies measuring susceptibility to misinformation [ 30, 56], participants were asked to rate the reliability of each of these statements on a 1-7 Likert scale, from 'very unreliable' (1) to 'very reliable' (7). We averaged scores on the six misinformation items into an overall index. A reliability analysis shows good internal consistency of the six misinformation statements ( α = 0.83, M = 2.46, s.d. = 1.32) [ 44], but not for the three combined factual and ambiguous statements ( α = 0.35), so we report these separately. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) revealed support for at least weak measurement invariance between countries. Electronic supplementary material, table S4 contains the descriptive statistics for each item. The study was approved by the Psychology Research Ethics Committee at the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

2.3. Statistical analyses

To measure whether belief in misinformation about COVID-19 can be seen as a 'monological' belief system, we calculated the Pearson's correlation coefficient between the perceived reliability of six common misinformation statements about COVID-19 (see electronic supplementary material, table S1 for the full list of items). To measure susceptibility to misinformation in each country, we calculated the overall perceived reliability of six common examples of misinformation about COVID-19, pooled as a single index, for each country in the sample. We conducted a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the six-item misinformation index as the dependent variable as well as a Tukey's HSD pairwise comparison to determine whether there is a significant difference in the perceived reliability of misinformation between countries.

To investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19, we estimated an ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression to predict susceptibility to misinformation (defined as the average of the reliability judgements of the six misinformation items) for each country. Based on the discussion in the introduction about both general and COVID-19-specific predictors of belief in misinformation, we include a number of key variables in our model. In terms of general predictors, the model controls for age, political ideology, self-perceived minority status, education, performance on numeracy tasks, trust in scientists, trust in government and trust in journalists. In terms of variables specific to the COVID-19 crisis, we include the following variables: COVID-19 risk perception, trust in politicians' and the WHO's approach to tackling the pandemic, and getting information about COVID-19 from social media and the WHO.

To investigate the effects of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 on people's willingness to (i) get vaccinated against COVID-19 (yes/no), and (ii) recommend getting vaccinated to vulnerable friends or family members (yes/no), we conducted two logistic regressions with susceptibility to misinformation as the independent variable and age, gender, education level, political ideology, self-perceived minority status, numeracy score and trust in scientists as control variables.

Finally, to examine the relation between susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation and compliance with health guidance measures, we conducted an OLS linear regression with health guidance compliance as the dependent variable, misinformation susceptibility as the independent variable, and age, gender, education level, political ideology, self-perceived minority status, numeracy score and trust in scientists as control variables. We include a variety of robustness checks-including models with robust standard errors-in the supplement.

3. Results

First, correlations between the perceived reliability of the six COVID-19 misinformation items range between r = 0.288 and r = 0.583 (all p < 0.001) and are strongest between the three conspiracy statements (about the virus being bioengineered in a Wuhan laboratory, it being part of a plot to enforce global vaccination and 5G towers exacerbating COVID-19 symptoms) ranging between r = 0.454 and r = 0.583 (see electronic supplementary material, table S20 for the full correlation matrix).

Second, figure 1 visualizes the overall perceived reliability of the six pooled misinformation statements in each country in a violin plot.

The figure shows that misinformation about the coronavirus is seen as relatively unreliable by a large majority of participants in all countries ( M pooled = 2.46, s.d. = 1.32). Strikingly, however, in all countries, the misinformation statement deemed most reliable was the claim that the coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan ( M pooled = 3.26, s.d. = 2.00, range M UK₌ 2.93 to M Spain₌ 3.90; see electronic supplementary material, table S4). Substantial segments rated this item above the midpoint of the scale (5-7), indicating that they find this conspiracy reliable, from about 22-23% in the UK and the USA, to 26% in Ireland, to about 33% and 37% in Mexico and Spain, respectively (see electronic supplementary material, table S8). In addition, we also checked how reliable participants found common factual statements about the virus (e.g. 'People with diabetes are at higher risk of complications from coronavirus'), with majorities in each country finding them reliable ( M diabetes = 5.61, s.d. diabetes= 1.52; M sanitizer = 4.98, s.d. sanitizer = 1.74), and a small but persistent group rating these statements as highly unreliable.

Using a one-way ANOVA with Tukey's HSD pairwise comparison, we find significant differences between several countries in the perceived reliability of misinformation ( F 4,3842 = 18.87, p < 0.001, η ² = 0.019); see also electronic supplementary material, table S7. COVID-19 misinformation is perceived as the most reliable in Mexico ( M = 2.78, s.d. = 1.38) and Spain ( M= 2.67, s.d. = 1.34) when compared with Ireland ( M= 2.49, s.d. = 1.34), the USA ( M= 2.36, s.d. = 1.28) and the UK ( M April= 2.31, s.d. April= 1.25 and M May = 2.32, s.d. May = 1.30; see electronic supplementary material, table S4). Furthermore, there appear to be minimal differences over time in terms of the average susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation: as figure 1 shows, the average perceived reliability of misinformation about the virus did not significantly change between April and May in the UK ( M diff= −0.012, t 2,2198 = −0.225, p = 0.822, d= −0.01); see electronic supplementary material, table S6.

3.1. Predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19

Figure 2 visualizes the results of the OLS linear regression with susceptibility to misinformation as the dependent variable. Table 1 reports the regression model, pooled and by country.8

A number of factors stand out as significant predictors of susceptibility to misinformation across the board. Both higher performance on the numeracy tasks and higher trust in scientists are significantly and consistently associated with lower susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 in the pooled model and in all countries surveyed. In addition, being older is also associated with lower susceptibility to misinformation in the pooled model and in all countries, except in Mexico, where the effect is also significant but reversed. Political ideology is significant in three out of five countries; identifying as more right-wing or politically conservative is associated with higher susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 in Ireland, Mexico and Spain, but notably not the USA and the UK. Self-identifying as a member of a minority group is also significantly associated with higher susceptibility to misinformation about the virus in all countries except the UK. Higher trust that politicians can effectively tackle the COVID-19 crisis predicts higher susceptibility to misinformation in Mexico, Spain and the USA. Finally, being exposed to information about the virus on social media is significantly associated with higher susceptibility to misinformation in Ireland, the UK and the USA. Electronic supplementary material, tables S13-S19 show the correlation matrices per country.

3.2. Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 and behavioural outcomes

To investigate the relation between misinformation and self-reported behaviour, we first examined whether susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation influences people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and recommend getting vaccinated to others. Figure 3 shows the results for the logistic regression for whether people would get vaccinated against COVID-19 themselves (the results for whether they would recommend vaccination to friends and family are highly similar, see electronic supplementary material, figure S2). Electronic supplementary material, tables S9 and S10 list the individual regression models by country.

Figure 3 shows that, when controlling for all other factors, a one-unit increase in susceptibility to misinformation (which was measured on a 1-7 Likert scale) is associated with a 23% (OR = 0.77, 95% CI [0.72, 0.83]) and 28% (OR = 0.72, 95% CI [0.67, 0.78]) decrease in the likelihood to get vaccinated and to recommend vaccination to vulnerable friends and family, respectively (see electronic supplementary material, table S10). This effect is consistent in all countries (with odds ratios ranging from 0.68 to 0.80) except Spain. Conversely, being older, male and especially having higher trust in scientists are all associated with an increased likelihood to get vaccinated against COVID-19, as well as to recommend others to get vaccinated. Some of these effects are substantial; for example, a one-unit increase in trust in scientists is associated with a 73% (OR = 1.73, 95% CI [1.57-1.91]) increase in the odds of getting vaccinated and a 79% (OR = 1.79, 95% CI [1.61-1.98]) increase in the odds of recommending vaccination to others. Education level, political ideology, self-identified minority status and performance on the numeracy task were not significant predictors of vaccination intentions (all p > 0.21).

Next, we investigated whether susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation predicts compliance with common health guidelines. Table 2 shows the results of the OLS linear regression with compliance with health guidance as the dependent variable.

Higher susceptibility to misinformation is the only variable in the model that predicts lower compliance with public health guidance, particularly in Mexico and Spain, but also in the USA. This effect is not significant in Ireland and the UK. Also of note is that women are significantly more likely than men to comply with a greater number of public health guidance measures in all countries surveyed.

4. Discussion

Overall, we find that the majority of people in the countries we surveyed do not report finding misinformation about COVID-19 credible, consistent with research on the spread of fake news in other contexts [ 7- 10]. However, we do find some cross-cultural differences, with the Mexican and Spanish samples rating COVID-19 misinformation as most reliable, before Ireland, the UK and the USA. This result follows a similar pattern as participants' performance on the numeracy task across these five countries, which may explain the variation (see electronic supplementary material, table S5). Nonetheless, notable segments in all countries find misinformation reliable. For example, between 7.43% (for the statement about hot air, in the USA) and 37.57% (for the statement about the virus being bioengineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, in Spain; see electronic supplementary material, table S8) of the sample rated misinformation about the virus as at least somewhat reliable, which is consistent with other recent estimates from the USA and the UK [ 6, 13, 23, 41, 60]. The strong correlations observed between these statements also support the idea that belief in misinformation about COVID-19 can be seen as a 'monological belief system' where belief in one conspiracy correlates with belief in others [ 31, 44, 45].

Moreover, although at most about 16% of people in our sample find the 5G conspiracy reliable (i.e. rate it above the midpoint, particularly in Spain and Mexico), the consequences of acting on those beliefs can be dire for society, as belief in the 5G conspiracy has been linked to violent intentions [ 6]. In fact, scholars have referred to misinformation about COVID-19 as a 'meta-risk' interfering with people's initial risk perception of the virus [ 61], which in itself is linked to the adoption of preventative health behaviours [ 52].

4.1. Predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19

We demonstrate that certain factors significantly influence people's susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19. For example, being exposed to information about the virus on social media is associated with higher susceptibility to misinformation, which is consistent with recent research showing that people are more likely to encounter fake news (including about COVID-19) via social media [ 9, 43]. One explanation for this finding is that misinformation via social media may be amplified through social consensus [ 62]. Further research is therefore needed to investigate the proliferation of COVID-19-related misinformation in specific social media echo chambers [ 43]. In addition, consistent with much previous research [ 7, 10, 22, 23, 27- 30, 41, 63], we find that political conservatism is associated with a slightly higher susceptibility to misinformation. However, although the direction is consistent, we did not find this association in the USA and in the UK, which is surprising given that right-leaning outlets were more likely to spread misinformation about COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic [ 64]. This could partially be explained by the fact that some of the variables in the model may have mediated the influence of political ideology; for example, 'trust in government' and 'trust in politicians' COVID-approach' are both political variables, and both are significant predictors in the USA (but not in the UK).

With respect to age, we find that being older is significantly associated with lower susceptibility to misinformation in all countries except in Mexico. This is not consistent with prior research [ 7, 9, 10], which typically finds the opposite pattern at least in the context of elections. For example, Guess et al. [ 10] found that being older than 65 was the largest predictor of sharing political fake news online. Importantly, it should be noted that in these studies, the context is different (politics versus health, e.g. older people are more vulnerable to COVID-19), and the variable of interest is often sharing of fake news, which we did not measure here. Nonetheless, it may be possible that while older individuals are less susceptible, they still share more fake news, for motivations other than accuracy (e.g. political gain and social consensus).

A number of other findings are more difficult to interpret. For example, self-identifying as a member of a minority predicts susceptibility to misinformation about the virus in all countries surveyed, except the UK (contrary to findings by Guess et al. [ 10]). It is important to note here that our question was phrased so as to include any self-identified minority group, not only ethnicity. For example, (strong) partisans could also self-identify as a minority, but models without self-perceived minority status did not substantially alter the effect of ideology on susceptibility to misinformation. Recent research suggests that conspiracy beliefs are more common among 'those who are more marginalized, reflected by lower levels of psychological well-being, education, and income' [ 16, 17, 23]. It is also possible that misinformation proliferates more widely in some networks than others, perhaps as a result of coordinated disinformation campaigns [ 65]. Some members of communities that are exposed to a larger than average amount of misinformation may, in turn, begin to perceive it as more reliable due to the 'illusory truth effect' [ 14]. At any rate, we caution against oversimplifying these findings, especially as we were unable to control for several other potentially important factors such as income or religiosity [ 34].

On the other hand, several factors appear to significantly decrease susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. First, higher trust in scientists is associated with lower belief in misinformation in all countries. This highlights not just the critical role that scientists play in combating the virus [ 21], but also the importance of communicating scientific research to the public: if the communication of scientific information is perceived as an attempt to be open and transparent [ 66], it might be trusted more and thereby reduce reliance on misinformation. This is especially important in light of the finding that higher trust in scientists is also associated with a higher willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or to recommend vaccination to vulnerable friends and family, as well as compliance with health guidance measures. Considering that trust is an important predictor of attention to recommendations by scientific experts [ 67], demonstrating trustworthiness when giving scientific expertise may thus have multiple beneficial outcomes.

Second, we note an interesting dichotomy in terms of the sources by which people acquire information about COVID-19 [ 43]: although getting information about the virus from social media is associated with higher susceptibility to misinformation, getting information from the WHO is associated with lower susceptibility. This finding alludes to the importance of source selection: the social media information landscape allows for a wide range of opinions to be expressed, which may not be subject to fact-checks or gatekeeping before being posted [ 68]. Choosing not to acquire information about COVID-19 from social media may thus reduce the amount of unofficial information that people receive, which in turn could reduce belief in misinformation.

Finally, the most consistent predictor of decreased susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 is performance on the numeracy tasks. It is worth noting that the construct of numeracy does not merely measure mathematical ability but captures the ability of individuals to understand and use quantitative information more broadly [ 38] and is associated with a propensity to apply a more 'system 2'-reliant mode of critical thinking [ 37]. Although some literature finds that higher numeracy facilitates rather than protects against motivated cognition [ 37], our findings are consistent with a large literature which finds that reflective and analytical thinking are consistently associated with reduced susceptibility to misinformation [ 33, 34, 69]. These findings are promising for potential interventions and suggest that developing critical thinking skills-such as learning how to identify fake news-may be an effective strategy to combat misinformation about COVID-19 [ 39, 70- 72].

4.2. COVID-19 misinformation and its influence on public health behaviours

Although previous research has debated the societal consequences of fake news [ 62], we clearly show that susceptibility to misinformation can be a significant factor in influencing people's behaviour during the COVID-19 outbreak in three important ways: it may make people less likely to report willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19, it may make them less likely to recommend vaccination to vulnerable people in their social circle, and it may decrease people's willingness to comply with public health guidance measures [ 39]. These findings are consistent with other emerging research in the context of COVID-19 which has linked specific conspiracy theories to lower willingness to adopt public health behaviours in the USA, France and the UK [ 39- 41]. They also highlight the critical importance of limiting the spread of misinformation about the virus. For example, increased vaccine hesitancy can reduce vaccination rates and compromise herd immunity [ 75]. Previous research suggests that whereas post hoc corrections may backfire [ 76], pre-emptive refutations of conspiracy theories through a process known as 'cognitive inoculation' can be effective at reducing belief in misinformation [ 29, 30, 77, 78].

Of course, our study is not without limitations. First, although we report robust associations across different cultural contexts in large national samples, we cannot infer causality. Although we have sought to include variables that are known to be important factors in shaping people's belief in misinformation in our models, we note that these results are exploratory and correlational. Having said this, it is unlikely that, for example, rating misinformation as more reliable causes lower numeracy; it is more likely that lower numeracy, representing, perhaps, a low propensity to engage in effortful 'system 2' type critical thinking, contributes to higher susceptibility to misinformation. Nonetheless, we cannot rule out alternative explanations. Similarly, although we have modelled misinformation as a predictor of vaccine hesitancy consistent with prior work in this area [ 39, 41, 42], we note the likely possibility that causality can run both ways: being vaccine hesitant may, in turn, also lead people to become more susceptible to misinformation (see electronic supplementary material, table S24). We encourage future research to investigate potential feedback loops between information and behaviour, and disentangle the direction of causality using non-recursive, longitudinal or experimental data.

Second, although our samples were balanced on national quotas and are therefore of higher quality than common convenience samples, they were not true probability samples of the target population in each country, and between-country differences in susceptibility to misinformation should therefore be interpreted with caution. Third, we note that the 'compliance with health guidance measures' variable suffers from some limitations: participants were not asked if they were voluntarily performing certain preventative behaviours (for example, if they were not staying home from work because their profession does not allow them to); and our measure does not take into account variability in certain behaviours (such as how often people wash their hands) due to its binary nature (participants could indicate either complying with a certain measure or not). However, we note that our results are similar to recent work on the relation between misinformation and health guidance compliance which does not suffer from the same limitations [ 47], indicating that our measure captures compliance with some degree of accuracy. Fourth, as we report in footnote 7 and electronic supplementary material, table S25, the six-item misinformation index is not entirely measurement non-invariant (although we find decent evidence for at least weak measurement invariance). We therefore caution the reader when interpreting differences between countries reported in this study. Notwithstanding these limitations, we offer the first large-scale comparative study of predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 and its link to preventative health behaviours.

5. Conclusion

We present the results of an international study, integrating previous research about predictors of belief in misinformation (both in general and specifically about COVID-19), and, in turn, how susceptibility to misinformation about the virus affects key self-reported health behaviours. In summary, while belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not held by a majority of people in any country that we examined, specific misinformation claims are consistently deemed reliable by a substantial segment of the public and pose a potential risk to public health. Crucially, we demonstrate a clear link, replicated internationally, between susceptibility to misinformation and vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood of complying with public health guidance. We highlight the key role that scientists play as disseminators of factual and reliable information, as well as the potential importance of fostering numeracy and critical thinking skills as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Further research should explore how digital media and risk literacy interventions may impact how (mis)information is received, processed and shared, and how they can be leveraged to improve resilience against misinformation on a societal level.

Ethics

This study was approved by the Psychology Research Ethics Committee at the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

Data accessibility

All data are available in the manuscript or the supplementary materials, and have been uploaded to the OSF: https://osf.io/jnu74/.

Authors' contributions

J.R. and S.v.d.L. conceptualized the study. A.L.J.F., S.v.d.L., J.R., S.D., C.R.S., G.R., J.K. and A.M.v.d.B. designed the instrument. A.L.J.F., G.R. and J.K. collected and processed the data. J.R. conducted all of the analyses with input from S.v.d.L., C.R.S., S.D., A.L.J.F. and G.R.; J.R. and S.v.d.L. drafted the manuscript with input and revisions from C.R.S., A.L.J.F., S.D., G.R., J.K. and A.M.v.d.B.

Competing interests

We declare we have no competing interests.

Funding

We received no funding for this study.

Acknowledgements

The Spanish translation of the survey was conducted by María del Carmen Climént-Palmer. We thank all participants for their time and input. The surveys in the UK, the USA, Mexico and Spain were funded by the Winton Centre for Risk & Evidence Communication, which is supported by a donation from the David & Claudia Harding Foundation. The survey in Ireland was funded by Science Foundation Ireland.

Footnotes

5 Dryhurst et al. [ 52] report acceptable internal consistency for their risk perception index ( α pooled = 0.72) across 10 different countries. The pooled Cronbach's α for the risk perception index for this study is also acceptable ( α pooled = 0.76).

6 This claim has been subject to a substantial amount of discussion in media, politics and the medical community, with medical experts usually recommending paracetamol instead of ibuprofen to treat COVID-19 symptoms [ 53]. On 16 April 2020, the British National Health Service issued a statement saying that 'there is no clear evidence that using ibuprofen to treat symptoms such as a high temperature can make coronavirus (COVID-19) worse' [ 54].

7 To account for language differences (between the Spanish and English versions of the survey) and to ensure that any observed intergroup differences can be interpreted meaningfully, we conducted an MG-CFA for the six misinformation items, with 'country' as the grouping variable. Although we do find significant differences in the Chi-squared difference test, this test is quite sensitive to sample size. Moreover, the difference in the comparative fit index (CFI) for the weak measurement invariance model is 0.002, which is lower than the proposed cut-off point of 0.01. In addition, the difference in RMSEA is 0.021, which is between the acceptable values of 0.015 and 0.03 [ 57, 58]; see electronic supplementary material, table S25 for a full overview. We thus find support for weak measurement invariance and, in line with Putnick & Bornstein's [ 59] recommendation, proceed with the analysis and interpret this as a minor limitation to our study.

9 It is worth noting that the Mexican sample was younger than the average age pooled across the other countries ( M Mexico = 38.68, s.d. Mexico = 14.57 versus M Overall = 44.73, s.d. Overall = 18.24); see electronic supplementary material, table S4.

10 The pooled sample contains both the April and May UK surveys. To evaluate the robustness of the model, we checked for linearity violations and whether the residuals are normally distributed (see electronic supplementary material, figure S1), and ran a robust standard error regression for the pooled model as well as by country, finding no meaningful differences between the robust model and the model reported here. The Durbin-Watson test (1.93, p = 0.004) confirmed that the errors were relatively uncorrelated (see electronic supplementary material, table S12).

11 This effect is not significant in Mexico and Spain, but we note the low number of people who indicate not receiving news about COVID-19 on social media, especially in Mexico ( n = 30), as well as the relatively large confidence intervals around these estimates.

14 We note that we cannot disentangle the causal direction of effects in this study. Both options are plausible, i.e., belief in COVID-19 misinformation could reduce willingness to get vaccinated, and prior vaccine hesitancy could increase belief in misinformation [ 73, 74]. A supplementary linear regression with misinformation as the dependent variable and with the question 'would you get vaccinated against COVID-19' as an independent variable (along with age, education, gender, political ideology, minority status, numeracy skills, COVID-19 risk perception and trust in scientists) shows that being willing to get vaccinated against the virus is a significant predictor of lower susceptibility to misinformation in three out of four countries (Spain being the exception). See electronic supplementary material, table S24 for a full overview.

Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5170488.

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Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world

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Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK (n = 1050 and n = 1150), Ireland (n = 700), the USA (n = 700), Spain (n = 700) and Mexico (...

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattklein/2020/11/17/the-problematic-fakery-of-lil-miquela-explained-an-exploration-of-virtual-influencers-and-realness/?sh=6939f15c1b8d

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Just as robots replaced the factory workers, and the drive-through workers were outsourced to India, those employed to yacht the world, drink fat-burning smoothies and just be attractive are getting furloughed too. Stars-they're just like us.

Influencers are being upended by Virtual Influencers, and these CGI avatars may be disrupting something even more integral: truth.

We've already been mystified by their soft edges and been made uncomfortable with their attractiveness. There's Shudu, the world's first digital supermodel, Blawko, the digital tattooed "fuccboi," and Miquela Sousa AKA Lil Miquela, the Princess Leia-bunned poster child of the movement. They now come in an array of options. Human or alien. Political or apolitical. White or BIPOC. Lean or plus-sized. Choose your player.

Insecure by your own success? These names have been sponsored by the likes of Chanel, made out with Bella Hadid, and graced the covers of Esquire. This year, Lil Miquela signed with CAA and is projected to earn over $10M. Someone who doesn't exist is more successful than you. Let that sink in.

Virtual Influencers' success thus far is clear from the business POV. Brands are attracted to the novel like bugs to a light. Virtual Influencers are controllable and pose no risk-Miquela doesn't have seven-year-old racist tweets to blow her film prospects. Further, it's proclaimed that Virtual Influencers command three times higher engagement than a human Influencer. And most apparently, they're nice to look at. So why not shell out for a sponsored post or invest tens of millions in their animators?

As these fictitious personas begin to thrive in the uncanny valley and spin off business implications left and right, what's just as noteworthy is what they silently scream about today's cultural climate. As the headlines mount, their prices climb, and more brands test drive the concept, we should take a beat.

How duped are we?

Virtual Influencers are not that original of a concept. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have been successfully animating their virtual band Gorillaz for over 20 years, snagging Grammy noms and even appearing on MTV's . But this was only after Alvin and the Chipmunks cleared the way back in 1958. Making them sexy isn't new either-check out Jessica Rabbit. And brands playing in this space is old hat. GEICO has been pulling the strings of their own virtual influencer, Martin the accented gecko, for over 15 years now.

What Tony the Tiger is to cable, Miquela is to Instagram. The only difference is that today's animated characters now have a life worth following. Miquela also isn't owned by the man... and she supports #BLM. It's only fitting that in 2020 our mascots are progressive free-agents hustling in the gig economy.

Christopher Travers, founder of VirtualHumans.org, the database for all things Virtual Influencers, says they "represent the ongoing merger of humanity and the internet." He believes, "Virtual influencers enhance and humanize the world's relationship with digital experiences." But what we're humanizing-our online convergence-may be unfit for personification. Perhaps it's a step too far.

In a 2018 interview with the publication Business of Fashion, Miquela shared, "I definitely wouldn't say my identity is crowdsourced. I'm an artist and have expressed opinions that are unpopular and as a result have cost me fans." Her literally crowdsourced answer is the work of Brud, the transmedia studio which is valued upwards of $125M. And it's this untruth-"I'm not crowdsourced"-a thread of deceptiveness, that when pulled, doesn't seem to end. When media literacy costs elections, we need more truth, not deception.

Miquela claims she's an AI robot. A fictitious entity, acting as a human, manifested as a life-like robot. "I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude." Of her millions of young followers, how many of them are fully conscious of her misrepresentation? Truth in Advertising, the industry watchdog, is calling for FTC reform. Scroll by fast and you can't spot the difference. And that's the very draw of Miquela, over the cartoonish Seraphine. Miquela attempts to pass. It's this effort that's critical. Any less realistic, it's try-hard. Any more realistic, it's nefarious. But while the majority notice the fakery, they're still left confused.

"There needs to be internet literacies for young people if Virtual Influencers are going to become more common," advises Dr. Jamie Cohen, an expert on digital culture. "The internet did not come with an instruction manual and we accept certain unique things to occur in that space, but knowledge of how Virtual Influencers operate, who operates them, why they operate them, and who they are for, is crucially important to a consumer culture."

Beyond transparency, another popular demerit of Virtual Influencers is their bar of unrealistic beauty. As Kaitlyn Tiffany for Vox puts it, "They are physically perfect women made of pixels, standing in for women who have long been pressured to become physically perfect, without the advantage of that even being possible." On a photo of Miquela posing with an actual model, one Lil Miquela fan account comments, "the robot more pretty." Miquela's handlers at Brud rush in to disagree with the commenter, perhaps recognizing "we went too hot."

Miquela isn't just competing with models, but real underrepresented talent. The fact that, "a glorified sticker", as writer Rob Horning puts it, is now competing with actually marginalized people is sinister. CGI-diversity is mistaken with real diversity. One online commenter asks, "Why rep a real woman of color when you can have a fake one that you can totally control everything about them?" To those leaning in, this is insincerity without awareness-a score against Team Human. And we're doing this to ourselves. It's self-deception at its worst.

Another more operational untruth is whether Miquela is even AI. That Brud claims to be a computer software, robotics and AI company, yet according to LinkedIn exclusively employs visual effect artists and content producers is another distortion. It's a collage of misrepresentation.

We don't seem to mind, though. What we're engaging in is kayfabe-Miquela and The Undertaker are one in the same. It's all pretend. We suspend our belief, and listen to Miquela's answers as if she was actually opinionated and freckled. VC's are spellbound too, just by sticker companies.

The world of Virtual Influencers permits adult playtime.

There's an irony here. Social media has become the bungalow to house our curated and filtered highlight reels, and Influencers, built up from trust, have sold out, pushing products and cashing oversized checks. Meanwhile, starlets like-for-like, and pay to inflate their metrics and procure verified checkmarks. This entire ecosystem is drenched in fiction. That GenZ is willing to engage with a flagrantly fake person should not be surprising. The illusion of "attainable beauty" is just the tip of the iceberg. It's all fake. We love it. And we can't get enough.

Miquela is a caricature of many users' own Insta presence. We strive for and fawn over her exaggerated life, but ignore the warning: it's not real.

Travers of VirtualHumans.org points out, "Virtual Influencers do not make social media fake-social media platforms predicated on celebrating fictional ideologies of life grew to create an environment now ripe for fictional characters to step in and succeed." One ushered in the other. But what's fascinating is that GenZ is both leaning into and rejecting this state of affairs. It's a push and pull.

When sweatpants-wearing, high school TikTokers rise to fame in their parent's kitchen and begin to dethrone The Kardashians, Jenners and Ratajkowski's of the world, change is afoot. GenZ is recognizing these people are in fact nothing like them. They never were. And who even wanted that? Those objects on our screen are not as close as they appear. What is the Influencer Economy, but just the redistribution of stardom and power from legacy names? And that a Brazilian, 20-year-old Miquela can be perceived and valued as more relatable than the traditional A-listers is significant.

The fake is more real.

According to a study by social content agency, Fullscreen, nearly a fourth of GenZ and Millennials would describe a Virtual Influencer as "authentic."

Some ask her, "Do you feel pain? Can you actually eat food? Do robots dream of electric sheep?" Others ask what her favorite song is or where she currently lives. She doesn't reply. Whether one is playing along or feels shrewd enough to try to out her, she's under our skin. For Dr. Cohen, the perennial question is, "Who is the one playing us, or are we the one playing the game?"

The yearning for this to all be real reveals a desperation. Miquela, unaffected by politics, debt, COVID-19 and bullies is what's truly aspirational. She's our best selves, stripped of our messy human shortcomings, disappointing flaws, and soft vulnerabilities-the inverse of a zombie. Being called less-or more-attractive than the real model beside her doesn't affect her ego. She has none. Isn't that the dream?

"We should be concerned by a Virtual Influencer's ability to create parasocial relationships," warns Dr. Cohen. When something is designed to take more from us than give back, we encounter trouble. When we close Instagram feeling worse, not better, after exploring Miquela's life, we hurt ourselves. Tell Siri you love her as a joke, it doesn't care. Not a stretch, our attraction toward Miquela hints at what's down the pike with the future of intimacy.

What is Miquela but the sex robot in each of our pockets?

According to Dr. Stacy Thayer, Professor of CyberPsychology at California Lutheran University, "[Virtual Influencers] create a fantasy, but has the potential to move us further away from acceptance of our own realities."

Miquela is a fantasy, but she's not to be mistaken with escapism. A sci-fi movie is escapism. Miquela captures, not frees us. Her looks and role straddles the fence between real and fake-or rather, there is no longer a fence, but just spillover. We don't know what to make of this early mess. As a result, we just stare and yell hypnotized-contrasting our looks to CGI beauty, getting lost in their fictitious feuds, and applauding the diversity and stretch marks of the plus-sized ones.

We're not entirely lost, though. There was proper backlash for when Miquela shared her "sexual assault encounter" in a rideshare via a vlog-one which never occurred in reality. PR at Lyft should be peeved. What's the legal basis for slander here? Also, can this piece be considered libel as it may affect Miquela's career prospects? In any case, slim chance law catches up this fast.

Publicity around Virtual Influencers should not be used as a proxy for their success or justification of their existence.

We're not too far gone. "Virtual influencers are a neutral content medium," says Travers. "Like podcasts, like short-form videos, or like selfies, Virtual Influencers can be used for whatever purpose the creator desires."

As more Virtual Influencers are spawned and Samsung works on their virtual human project, NEON, we should focus on intent. It's not that these characters exist, it's what we decide to do with them. Some are already leveraging the concept to educate people about The Holocaust, memorializing victims to share their stories after they pass. Others are approaching virtual avatars as characters to confide in as they don't judge and are more accessible and affordable than talk therapy.

Our way through is to remember what we've been taught. Let's not judge Virtual Influencers because they're different. Let's look past appearances. Rather, let's consider their character. Not how they look, but how they behave, and why they're here? What is their purpose, and how do they help us?

Technology is a tool to better understand ourselves, after all. A black mirror.

Miquela isn't real. Which begs the question, are we any better?

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The Problematic Fakery Of Lil Miquela Explained-An Exploration Of Virtual Influencers and Realness

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Just as robots replaced the factory workers, and the drive-through workers were outsourced to India, those employed to yacht the world, drink fat-burning smoothies and just be attractive are getting furloughed too. Stars-they're just like us. Influencers are being upended by Virtual Influencers, and these CGI avatars may be disrupting something even more integral: truth.

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https://www.who.int/campaigns/connecting-the-world-to-combat-coronavirus/how-to-report-misinformation-online

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As the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, we face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to the virus. Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful.

Inaccurate information spreads widely and at speed, making it more difficult for the public to identify verified facts and advice from trusted sources, such as their local health authority or WHO.

However, everyone can help to stop the spread. If you see content online that you believe to be false or misleading, you can report it to the hosting social media platform.

WHO works with the Government of the United Kingdom to tackle misinformation

In the context of the strategic partnership with the Government of the United Kingdom, WHO has joined forces with its communications teams to raise awareness of misinformation around COVID-19 and encourage individuals to report false or misleading content online.

This cooperation started with the joint Stop the Spread campaign in May-June 2020, which encouraged the use of trusted sources such as WHO and national health authorities for accurate COVID-19 information. The new phase of the joint campaign focuses on proactively identifying and reporting potentially wrong or misleading information, as part of WHO's efforts to address the spread of inaccurate and harmful information during the pandemic.

Learn more about inaccurate information on theWHO myth busters pages.

Visit our infodemiology pages to familiarize yourself with this emerging field of science.

Learn more about cyber security.

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As the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, we face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to the virus. Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful. However, everyone can help to stop the spread.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-12-09/social-media-conspiracy-theorists-5g-covid-19-influencers/12937950

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What do social media influencers and conspiracy theorists have in common?

It's a question that sociologist Stephanie Alice Baker from City, University of London had not seriously considered before the COVID-19 pandemic.

But while investigating how social media influencers were responding to the pandemic she noticed that the techniques lifestyle gurus used to promote themselves were also being adopted by conspiracy theorists.

These were techniques that Dr Baker had described in a recently published book titled Lifestyle Gurus: Constructing Authority and Influence Online.

"I think these are just savvy marketing techniques. [Influencers] are not all trying to dupe the public, but they are brands," Dr Baker says.

"It's important to see conspiracy theorists through the same lens."

Both influencers and conspiracy theorists could only thrive in a "low-trust society", she says.

"There's no way these techniques would be nearly as effective if you didn't have a climate of distrust [in authority figures] and if people were not generally uncertain and fearful.

"That combination allows influencers to use the techniques I've outlined to establish authority."

A hero's journey

Both influencers and conspiracy theorists present themselves as anti-establishment underdogs on a "hero's journey", comparable to Biblical tales of good versus evil, Dr Baker says.

"They don't totally manufacture these narratives, but they cherry-pick information and it's woven with anecdotal evidence."

"It's great storytelling, really."

Dr Baker cites the case of the viral conspiracy theory film Plandemic, which promoted misinformation about COVID-19 and was eventually removed from Facebook and other social networks for violating their guidelines.

The star of the film, Judy Mikovits, was presented in the film as a "whistle-blower and scientist who'd been wronged by [US government scientist Dr Anthony] Fauci and the scientific community in general," she says.

The timing of the film also just so happened to coincide with the publication of Mikovits' book.

"The viral spread [of Plandemic] was not just about sharing misinformation ... it is a good example of promoting a political influencer and establishing her identity as an underdog."

Former Instagram star Belle Gibson, who made hundreds of thousands of dollars from false claims her diet cured her brain cancer, similarly gained a huge following online by positioning herself as a rebel who defeated the odds against medical advice.

Colin Klein, a philosopher at the Australian National University, has also observed strategies that conspiracy theorists use to convince others they are telling the truth.

Professor Klein, who studies the way people debate and promote conspiracy theories on the popular online forum Reddit, says that many users described their newfound belief in a conspiracy as a hero's journey or "religious awakening".

But he found that such users had not actually been randomly enticed by misinformation, but were rather drawn to the conspiracy forum by their pre-existing views.

"There's a tempting picture ... that people are largely passive, that there's misinformation around and people accidentally get exposed to it," he says.

"In fact many of these things only work because they're falling on people who are predisposed [to conspiratorial thinking]. They either have these narratives of the world or they're susceptible to it."

Constructed friendships

Dr Baker says prominent conspiracy theorists established trust by positioning themselves as equals or friends directly communicating with their audiences.

They share personal information about their daily routines, sometimes multiple times a day, in a performance of manufactured authenticity.

This helps them quickly build trust and relationships with people they have never physically met.

"Whereas mainstream authority figures are distrusted for various reasons, these online users are trusted ... for being just like us," Dr Baker says.

"It fosters this degree of trust because people feel they know them like they know a friend.

"We know from advertising that people are much more likely to trust their friend's advice than some professional or paid celebrity endorsement."

Click-Sick: The impact of health misinformation

If you share dodgy medical advice online, how much damage can it do? On Science Friction:

Edward Hurcombe, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology's Digital Media Research Centre, has studied how 5G- and COVID-19-related conspiracy theories migrate from fringe groups on Facebook to mainstream news outlets.

The study, published in the Media International Australia journal in August, found the major turning point came when celebrities and sports stars amplified the misinformation to their millions of followers on social media, even when they didn't directly endorse it.

"We found that it really became a story in the mainstream consciousness and really started getting attention on Facebook after celebrities like [American singer] Keri Hilson and Woody Harrelson posted about 5G and COVID-19 ... raising this possibility of 'are they connected?'" Dr Hurcombe says.

"News articles started reporting on the conspiracy because celebrities were talking about it. Celebrities talking about a conspiracy theory [is] almost inherently newsworthy."

Although many of the news articles were critical of the celebrities involved, conspiracy theorists used this coverage to indicate that they were "close to uncovering some deeper truth," he says.

Blowing off steam with conspiracies

The ANU's Professor Klein says it isn't clear how many people who discuss conspiracies on Reddit genuinely believe them.

He argues that conspiracy theories serve unique purposes for individuals, some of whom just use them to "blow off steam".

"People are coming up with hypotheses, they're debating them. That feeling of being a part of a community and having that collaborative project is actually really important," he says.

People participate less in social clubs like the RSL and party politics than they did 30 years ago, Professor Klein says, which means that offline life had become more fragmented.

That makes the mere act of discussing conspiracies "a valuable thing in its own right", he says, even if they didn't believe in them, as it allows some form of interaction.

He likened people chatting about conspiracies online to a group of friends discussing the AFL grand final at a pub.

"Imagine someone saying at the pub 'Geelong's going to go all the way next year'. Do they really believe that in the way I believe in the theory of gravity?" he says.

"It's responsive to what's going on, but it's also an expression of being a [Geelong] Cats fan.

"It's some mix of belief and hope and expression of who you are and what your worldview is. It's hard to disentangle these."

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What do lifestyle gurus and conspiracy theorists have in common?

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Both present themselves as anti-establishment underdogs, comparable to Biblical tales of good versus evil. But it's not just this 'hero's journey' narrative that helps spread conspiracy theories and extend influencer reach online.

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https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/How-to-know-what-to-trust-DIGITAL_092320.pdf

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Information literacy in the age of algorithms

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https://www.marketingweek.com/programmatic-advertising/

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What is programmatic advertising? A beginner’s guide

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A beginner’s guide to programmatic advertising including how to use data effectively, choosing a programmatic model and defining programmatic KPIs.

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https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/antivaccination-audiences-monetize/

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This article is the first in our Digital Investigations Recipe Series, a collaboration between the Public Data Lab, Digital Methods Initiative, Open Intelligence Lab and First Draft. It is designed to lift the lid on advanced social media analysis. Please read our example investigation below first and then refer to the recipe How are they funded? Investigating ad trackers with Gephi and the DMI Tracker Tracker tool for a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a similar investigation.

The growth of the anti-vaccination movement is, in many ways, unsurprising. The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a chaotic and uncertain information ecosystem , creating the perfect conditions for rumors and conspiracies to thrive. The anti-vaccination movement, while still an online minority, is loud, increasingly networked and a significant source of vaccine misinformation. But how does the movement support itself and how might it be monetizing misinformation ?

We know the anti-vaccination movement benefits from millions of dollars from different . But what kinds of technologies, infrastructures, products and services do online publishers of vaccine misinformation use and depend on to make money? And what can - those small bits of code embedded in websites that are used to do things such as monitor engagement, quantify website visits, track user behavior and assess the effectiveness of ads - tell us about these strategies?

Some of the biggest social media and tech platforms, including Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook , recently stated they will take more aggressive action against posts and videos containing Covid-19 vaccine misinformation. But these companies are more than simple platforms that host posts and videos. Google and Facebook also provide a suite of tools for website publishers, including trackers to monitor audience engagement, create networks of followers and target ads.

To find out how anti-vaccination websites were using these platform-provided tools, we conducted an analysis of the trackers used by 60 anti-vaccination websites. Using the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) Tracker Tracker tool with Gephi (a network analysis tool that visualizes the relationships between actors and the social structures that emerge through these relationships), we reveal how these sites employ vast configurations of advertisement, social media and analytics trackers to drive traffic, build audiences and monetize the activity of their users.

We found that anti-vaccination websites, despite the latest proclamations from the large platforms, have at various points installed and configured different combinations of analytics trackers to facilitate the flow of traffic to their websites, the building of audiences and communities, and the targeting and serving of ads . While some of these sites may have been blacklisted by the tracker providers, this nevertheless gives an indication of the important role that the technologies of these companies have played in publishing anti-vaccination websites.

As you can see in this network analysis (see for a more detailed explanation), Google Analytics, Facebook Connect and DoubleClick (which was acquired by Google in 2007) are some of the most pervasive trackers among the 60 anti-vaccination websites we analyzed. The size of these dots (or nodes) as well as their location at the center of the image signify their importance in the network. The different lines (or edges) that are tentacles from these popular trackers highlight the different connections between the tracker technologies and other websites. While many anti-vaccination websites shared these tracking technologies (Google Analytics, Facebook Connect and DoubleClick), not all sites employed the same publishing or monetization strategies.

One website (see the image below) used a particular set of trackers associated with "programmatic advertising" - where different algorithms bid on advertisements in fractions of a second. As you can see, it is relatively separate (located in the bottom right of the image) from the main cluster of nodes. This is because many of these trackers (represented by the small nodes orbiting the large node at the center) were unique to that site, illustrating how some anti-vaccination websites are experimenting with new technologies and services to monetize their content.

We can't say for certain how much money anti-vaccination websites are making through the use of these kinds of tracking products. And the code making up these trackers can still exist on a website even if the tracker providers ban their usage, complicating efforts to establish clear links between websites and tech platforms through network analysis. Nonetheless, the presence of many different ad trackers on these sites, not just those from the major platforms, clearly shows how anti-vaccination websites have sought to monetize their content through advertisements.

Studying trackers offers a behind-the-scenes look at how these websites are configured, how they work and how they seek to make money. While using the network analysis approach can show the broader publishing, media or business models behind anti-vaccination websites, journalists should always verify these findings with subsequent research. Networks often aren't the story themselves, but they provide leads that prompt subsequent investigations, such as Paige St. John's Pulitzer-winning reporting on the murky Florida property insurance system. In this instance, networks provided leads, but the networks were not published as part of the investigation.

In the case of anti-vaccination websites, networks of trackers tell only one part of the story. Manually inspecting the interfaces and code of these sites, for example, reveals other ways that these anti-vaccination websites are able to build audiences and monetize their content, such as through newsletters, the selling of proprietary wellness and nature products as well as books shown on-site, and in some instances hosted and sold on Amazon.

The above analysis is not an exhaustive study of all websites pushing vaccine misinformation. It is only a small sample. Nonetheless, the analysis demonstrates different ways that anti-vaccination websites are building audiences and monetizing their sites. And as long as there are ways to make money off misinformation, the incentive to publish and push misleading content will remain.

If you want step-by-step instructions on how to use the methods and approaches discussed here, you can use our recipe How are they funded? Investigating ad architectures with Gephi and the DMI Tracker Tracker tool. It's important to remember that analyzing networks of tracker technologies often results in leads for further investigations rather than conclusive and generalizable findings. This was the case in the above analysis. As such, when using the recipe that produced the analysis, you should think of it as an exploratory tool for your online investigations.
Liliana Bounegru is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the Department of Digital Humanities , King's College London. She is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab and affiliated with the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam and the , Sciences Po in Paris. More about her work can be found . You can follow her on Twitter at . Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.

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How anti-vaccination websites build audiences and monetize misinformation

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Anti-vaccination websites employ ad, social media and analytics trackers to drive traffic, build audiences and monetize misinformation.

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https://iabaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IAB_Native-Advertising-Playbook_Oct-2017.pdf

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View of The Problems with Immersive Advertising: In AR/VR, Nobody Knows You Are an Ad | Journal of Online Trust and Safety

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https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

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Credit... Antonio Bolfo/Reportage for The New York Times

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: "If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that? "

Pole has a master's degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. "The stereotype of a math nerd is true," he told me when I spoke with him last year. "I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics."

As the marketers explained to Pole - and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop - new parents are a retailer's holy grail. Most shoppers don't buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target - cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company's primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it's a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers' shopping habits are ingrained, it's incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person's life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments - the moment, really - is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target's marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. "Can you give us a list?" the marketers asked.

"We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there's a good chance we could capture them for years," Pole told me. "As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they're going to start buying everything else too. If you're rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you'll grab a carton. Oh, and there's that new DVD I want. Soon, you'll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back."

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code - known internally as the Guest ID number - that keeps tabs on everything they buy. "If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we've sent you or visit our Web site, we'll record it and link it to your Guest ID," Pole said. "We want to know everything we can."

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you've moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you've ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That's where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target's Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a "predictive analytics" department devoted to understanding not just consumers' shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. "But Target has always been one of the smartest at this," says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. "We're living through a golden age of behavioral research. It's amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now."

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. "It's like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays," said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. "Mathematicians are suddenly sexy." As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit - a specific approach to worker safety - which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its "chief scientist" to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Inside the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O.R.'s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains.

An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn't figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat's meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

The probes in the rats' heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal's head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic - as it became a habit - the rats started thinking less and less.

This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called "chunking." There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids' lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it's remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.

Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.

Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. So we've devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It's something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends - and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they're formed, despite our best intentions.

To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats' brain activity - once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats' brains were fully engaged, and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From behind the partition, the rat wasn't sure what waited on the other side, until it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the "maze habit," and its brain activity decreased. Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop - cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward - becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What's unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel's lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable - but measurable - sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren't destiny - they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it's also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit - unless you find new cues and rewards - the old pattern will unfold automatically.

"We've done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward," Graybiel told me. "Then one day, we'll put the reward in the old place and put in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never really disappear."

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it's essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward - craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment - and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological "pleasure" (even if we don't recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread - even if you know, rationally, it's most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you'll find, over time, that you're able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.

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February 16, 2012 - In a preview of this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Charles Duhigg details how some retailers profit by predicting major changes in your life.

Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world's largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers. P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.'s executives began a secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.& G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product - Febreze - the company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated the product's cues and rewards just right.

The first ad showed a woman complaining about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. "Sophie will always smell like Sophie," she says, but with Febreze, "now my furniture doesn't have to." The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman's home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.'s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.

According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, "What do you do about the cat smell?"

"It's usually not a problem," she said.

"Do you smell it now?"

"No," she said. "Isn't it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!"

A similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze wasn't selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn't detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don't smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. That's why Febreze was a failure. The product's cue - the bad smells that were supposed to trigger daily use - was hidden from the people who needed it the most. And Febreze's reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn't smell offensive scents in the first place.

P.& G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze's ad campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people's daily habits. When that didn't reveal anything, they went into the field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn't appear to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze.

"I use it every day," she said.

"What smells are you trying to get rid of?" a researcher asked.

"I don't really use it for specific smells," the woman said. "I use it for normal cleaning - a couple of sprays when I'm done in a room."

The researchers followed her around as she tidied the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet's corners, then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children's shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.

"It's nice, you know?" she said. "Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when I'm done with a room." At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.

When they got back to P.& G.'s headquarters, the researchers watched their videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.

The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you've done a great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.

And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs - air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents - that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it's one of the top-selling products in the world.

Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers' habits to expand Target's sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department's work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole's most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers' lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples' most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they're more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there's an increased chance they'll start buying different brands of beer.

Consumers going through major life events often don't notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are "vulnerable to intervention by marketers." In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone's shopping patterns for years.

And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents' habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole's colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There's, say, an 87 percent chance that she's pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What's more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny's habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she'll use it when she comes back again.

In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny's habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target's national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company's cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.

At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?

"If we send someone a catalog and say, 'Congratulations on your first child!' and they've never told us they're pregnant, that's going to make some people uncomfortable," Pole told me. "We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you're following the law, you can do things where people get queasy."

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

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How to Break the Cookie Habit

Charles Duhigg explains the science of habits.

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Charles Duhigg explains the science of habits.

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."

When I approached Target to discuss Pole's work, its representatives declined to speak with me. "Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience," the company wrote in a statement. "We've developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population." When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: "Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point." The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target "is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information."

When I offered to fly to Target's headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. "I've been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave," said a very nice security guard named Alex.

Using data to predict a woman's pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers' hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone's habits without letting them know you're studying their lives?

Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.

I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading "NO MORE COOKIES." But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I'll muster the willpower to resist.

Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.

When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.

Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we're often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague's desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.

All that was left was identifying the cue.

Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you're hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:

Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)

What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)

What's your emotional state? (Bored.)

Who else is around? (No one.)

What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)

The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.

Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine - to socialize, rather than eat a cookie - I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn't feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It's now a habit. I've lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).

After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.

The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women from Pole's list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, 'Here's everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,' " one Target executive told me. "We do that for grocery products all the time." But for pregnant women, Target's goal was selling them baby items they didn't even know they needed yet.

"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits - the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks - then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There's a cue ("Oh, a coupon for something I need!") a routine ("Buy! Buy! Buy!") and a reward ("I can take that off my list"). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target's Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company doesn't break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 - when Pole was hired - and 2010, Target's revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company's president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company's "heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby."

Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. "I never expected this would become such a big deal," he told me the last time we spoke.

A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn't talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife's pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.

Pole didn't answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can't have too many pacifiers.

When I paid, I didn't receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn't purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target's computers that I was on a business trip. Pole's prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: "Just wait. We'll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them."

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How Companies Learn Your Secrets (Published 2012)

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Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: "If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that?

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https://iview.abc.net.au/show/question-everything

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Wil Anderson, Jan Fran and some of Australia's best and brightest comedians dissect the news to give you the clues to unpack the news, miss all the misinformation, and stay informed not alarmed.

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https://www.goviralgame.com/en

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https://crankyuncle.com/game/

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The Cranky Uncle game uses cartoons and critical thinking to fight misinformation. The game was developed by Monash University scientist John Cook, in collaboration with creative agency Goodbeast. The game is now available for free on iPhone, Android, and as a browser game.

The game was first crowd-funded and developed at George Mason University, with version 1.0 launching in December 2020. Version 2.0 was launched a year later, featuring multiple languages. Anyone interested in helping with our efforts to translate the game into different languages, please sign up to indicate your interest.

Building public resilience against misinformation
Developing solutions to misinformation is more important than ever in this post-truth era where science and facts are under constant assault. A key solution to making the public more resilient against fake news is inoculation - avoid being misled by learning the techniques of denial.

In the Cranky Uncle game, players are mentored by a cartoon personification of climate science denial. Cranky Uncle explains 14 techniques of science denial, from fake experts to cherry picking and a variety of different logical fallacies.
Using gamification to practice critical thinking
Cook's research has focused on critical thinking as a tool for building public resilience against misinformation. "The challenge is critical thinking is hard," explains Cook. "That's where the combined effect of humor and games are so powerful - they engage players and get them practising critical thinking through gameplay." The deeper a player gets into the game, the more resilient they become against misinformation.

This (non-profit) game will be available in classrooms and to the general public around the world, on iPhone and Android. We use gameplay elements such as interactive quizzes and reward feedback to engage players, taking them deeper into the game - the longer they play, the more resilient they become against climate misinformation.

Supported by:

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Cranky Uncle game: building resilience against misinformation - Cranky Uncle

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The Cranky Uncle game uses cartoons and critical thinking to fight misinformation. The game was developed by Monash University scientist John Cook, in collaboration with creative agency Goodbeast. The game is now available for free on iPhone, Android, and as ... Continued

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https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/native-ads.php

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The news industry is full of ideas when it comes to experimenting with new storytelling formats and techniques-podcasts, virtual reality, Instagram posts. The list is long, but storytelling across these media and platforms is something the journalism-adjacent advertising industry has been experimenting with for decades. Complex ad-measurement metrics now demonstrate, in granular detail, the effectiveness of traditional advertisements. The rapid adoption of those metrics across the ad industry has forced news organizations to defend how they manage their ad businesses. Publications old and new have to justify the effectiveness of advertisements they create or distribute for clients. This relationship has forced many publications to reimagine their business models as they continue to transition from print to digital.

Newspapers were once able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single full-page print ad, but as readers abandoned their print subscriptions in favor of digital news, many advertisers realized they were no longer reaching the same large audiences in print. Meanwhile, new digital media began to flourish in the ad-supported digital ecosystem. However, the conventional banner, pre-roll, and pop-up advertising that could be measured for effectiveness was found wanting, to put it mildly-AdAge has described click-through rates on these units as "abysmal."

Enter native advertising: Native ads take on the appearance of real news stories, and are crafted by people inside news publications who want to create and spread commercial messages that don't look like traditional advertisements that overtly push product. This report clearly outlines how news outlets produce native advertising and how this practice borrows credibility from the newsroom in order to enhance the value of the ad created for clients.

Native advertising has been found to deceive readers. Journalists know this. Ultimately, the trust they work hard to secure may be jeopardized by the creation and dissemination of native advertisements.

Executive Summary

Native advertising is not an entirely new concept; in fact, it bears a striking resemblance to the product public relations firms sell. PR firms routinely pitch journalists story ideas that make their client's products and services look good. There is more than one difference between ads and PR, but one is key for our purposes here: news publishers don't earn any advertising revenue if their reporters decide to write on a topic a public relations firm told them about. Native advertising enables news publishers to charge brands for work that has traditionally been performed by PR firms.

This development has created an intimate relationship between brands and news publishers-one that deserves careful examination. After a series of over thirty interviews with people who sell, write, produce, and distribute native advertising, a few important themes bubbled to the surface.
Key Findings:

Native ads borrow the credibility and authority of their respective news publishers. A former employee of the T Brand Studio, The New York Times's branded content division, said the studio tries to create native ads that are "Times-ian."This notion-creating content that is in the same tone as a publication's newsroom-was repeated on several occasions by people working across several news titles.

Clients have significant negotiation power. News publishers compete with each other for advertising revenue and this environment gives marketers an upper hand when they negotiate the terms of a native campaign. One phrase came up in over half the interviews with people with work experience at branded content studios: clients, our interviewees constantly told us, always ask for something that "has never been done " The demand for novelty forces news organizations to pitch campaigns that are closely aligned with what journalists are producing, because other marketing channels can't offer their clients this association. Selling partnerships with journalists was once considered unethical. Partnerships that would not have been possible in 2012 are now becoming standard practice, as clients can point to a new and unusual partnership with another publisher the previous year. The power imbalance means we may be in a race to the bottom when it comes to pushing back on how advertisers can and should work with new outlets.

Transparency is only part of the solution. Regulation managing how news publishers work with clients is needed. Otherwise, advertisers can continue to pit news outlets against one another, ultimately sacrificing the quality of news coverage placed in front of readers. One employee who worked inside The Atlantic's branded content studio said "publishers actively work with brands that are antithetical to their mission," citing a partnership between the magazine and the Church of Scientology. The employee went on to explain how the publisher actively pitched advertisers branded content that was visible on the homepage of The Atlantic's website.

Methodology

The purpose of this report is to outline how advertisers work with news publishers. Properly unpacking this relationship required conducting a series of 32 interviews with people who work inside branded content studios. A mix of legacy publications and digital-only websites were included in this study because we believe both are crucial to a full understanding of how news publishers deal with this market.

This diverse set of companies included: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Conde Nast, ATTN:, and BuzzFeed. Secondary sources were also vital to a full picture of the trend's adoption across the industry. These sources come from a literature review of publicly available press pieces, academic texts, and ad industry handbooks that deal with native advertising, cited throughout.

The research was driven by a standard set of questions, asked of each interviewee: What's the relationship between journalists and advertisers at your organization? Has it changed? How are native ads pitched? Who helps make them? How are they labeled? Who decides? What do clients ask for? How do you negotiate the terms of a branded content campaign?

These questions are meant to provide readers, journalists, and students with a clear understanding of the ethical challenges emerging inside news organizations today. After outlining how native advertising gets pitched and created, this guide aims to show news workers how to navigate the interests of the business side of a news organization without sacrificing their journalistic integrity. As for news readers, I hope this report encourages careful review of the articles that whiz by us, because they may be shaped by commercial interests that have the potential to conflict with the publication's duty to its readers.

Introduction: Why Are Publishers Making Native Ads?

Today, native advertising is the central digital revenue stream for the publishing industry. It makes up some 60% of the market, or $32.9 billion, according to a 2018 forecast by market research firm eMarketer. Understanding why the trend has taken off with such speed requires a fuller appreciation of the changes that have shaped our overall information environment.

How we choose to spend our time means weighing trade-offs: What should we do right now? And what are we comfortable missing? In economics this trade-off is referred to as opportunity cost: Every time we make a choice, a cost is incurred-the loss of the second best choice. Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University, expanded on this concept in his book The Attention Merchants, in which he posits that time has become a commodity in large part because we have so many options when it comes to deciding how to spend it.

Wu says that today we live in an "attention economy." An abundance of media channels provide us with more choices, meaning producers of content-from journalists to lawmakers-must work harder to secure the increasingly scarce resource of attention. News publishers compete for attention alongside everyone else. As a consequence of this newly widened media landscape, legacy news publishers are no longer able to exclusively capture ad revenue at the same scale, and with the same ease, as they were when print was their primary medium. Before the explosion of digital platforms, marketers relied heavily on print newspapers. There were neither browser extensions to hide the ads nor "engagement metrics" ostensibly guaranteeing that an ad had been "delivered" to a reader's eyeballs. One print ad used to reach a large and captive audience: The New York Times first passed the million-copy mark for its daily edition's circulation in 1985; in 2015 the print edition hovered around 625,000.

As profits from traditional forms of advertising continue to shrink, digital "display" ad formats-the boxes of text, images, or video that sit at the top of a given page, called "banners," and the boxes that cover content until you dismiss them, called "pop-ups"- have not replaced the lost revenue. According to Smart Insights, an advertising measurement platform, these units have an average "click-through" rate of only .05 percent.

Worse, the number of times an ad has been shown to a potential customer-which retroactively determines the price of the ad- is often over-reported. Data suggest people don't view them and that many of the clicks are accidental. The public also gets irritated by ads that pop up and auto-play video because they interrupt the reading experience. Hence, ad-blocking technology is extremely popular and effective. Thirty percent of internet users are using some type of ad blocker.

Branded content has seemed like a perfect solution. For one, it has none of the many drawbacks of digital display ads. The goal of branded content is not to distract, irritate, or annoy, but rather to engage people. The jargon around this concept can get confusing because branded content and native advertising are often used interchangeably, but they represent two different functions: Branded content is the word used by the ad industry to describe the type of content they are either making or buying. Chris Rooke, senior vice president of strategy and operations at the native advertising production company Nativo, explained in an interview that branded content is made with the intent to affect "consumer perception, affinity, and consideration."

What distinguishes branded content from traditional TV spots or print ads is that the "content" attempts to deliver something its target audience will recognize as valuable. This might take the form of original reporting on a news website, or a compelling narrative around a product instead placing a brand at the center of a story. In contrast to digital display ads, value in branded content is defined by its non-interruptive nature and the way it provides people with content they might choose to see because it is entertaining or informative.

Native advertising simply refers to the placement of branded content. When branded content appears in a form that mimics the appearance of where it is placed, it becomes native advertising. For example, a native ad that is published on a news publisher's website will take on a similar visual aesthetic and writing tone as the publication. It may use the same font as the publisher's newsroom, it certainly shares the same URL, and depending on the publisher it may share imagery or pictures with the newsroom.

Branded content created by an advertiser and uploaded to that advertiser's YouTube channel is not native. YouTube is not lending its logo to the advertiser, it is simply hosting another entity's content. But, if an advertiser pays someone to create branded content on their behalf, like an influencer, then the content would be considered native advertising because it is in the influencer's tone of voice, or mimics their aesthetic.

Over the past decade, numerous news publishers have created branded content departments. Native advertising not only mimics news content in appearance, but it is also delivered through the same platform, and allows for the same interactive elements. Branded content departments are tasked with selling original marketing to advertisers by guaranteeing reader engagement with content (text, video, podcasts, etc.) Engagement in this context is defined by time spent on page, video views, or scroll depth. The business model of selling native ads is so lucrative that many respected news publishers have invested in the trend. The New York Times opened T Brand Studio (disclosure: I worked in T Brand from the fall of 2015 to the spring of 2017); The Atlantic has Re:Think; BBC hosts Storyworks; and Condé Nast has tried to position 23 Stories as a stand-alone agency. Native advertising is predicated on a newspaper's ability to translate the storytelling credibility of its newsroom to the publisher's advertising department, even though it remains largely separate from the newsroom.

Publishers are well suited to making native ads because their newsrooms already create stories that millions of people read every day. A newspaper's advertising department claims to be able to do the same thing for clients, especially and explicitly if it has branded content studio. The New York Times's native advertising department, T Brand Studio, marketed its services with the slogan "Stories that influence the influential."6 The explainer video on T Brand's website emphasizes the newsroom's role in inspiring the studio's branded content. The video features vignettes that shift back and forth between images of news articles-created by Times journalists- and images of native ads produced by T Brand for clients. The video was created to attract advertisers, not to explain how The Times actually creates native ads. It shows the finished product, advertisements, and compares it to the work of the organization's newsroom.

Who Makes Native Ads?

News organizations were never structured to create original advertisements for clients. Publishers were simply distribution platforms. The advertising department inside a news publisher used to be filled, almost entirely, by salespeople. Success was defined by the thickness of a magazine, because that meant the issue attracted a lot of advertisers. Advertising agencies and clients were on the other side of the process. They gave salespeople the commercial messages they wanted readers to see. Traditionally, advertising agencies worked directly with brands to produce original commercial content. When the news industry realized it had to offer advertisers something besides distribution-native advertising-to remain profitable, the first task was obvious: they had to hire people who could make ads.

More than a quarter of the people I interviewed first found their job inside a branded content studio because the job title matched what they were searching for when looking for open positions in the advertising industry. Every publisher in this study created new job titles: Creative Director, Strategist, Video Producer. These job titles had never existed in news publishing before; they were the terms advertising agencies used. Entire departments inside ad agencies are filled with strategists and video producers.

The new job titles spoke clearly to ad industry veterans who might be seeking open positions inside news organizations. Clare Stein is now the creative director of a digital publisher ( ATTN:) and she had this exact experience when she made the decision to leave advertising to join The New York Times in 2014. Stein was hired as the first creative media strategist at the Times. She sat within a department called Sales Development. Prior to joining the paper she worked as a copywriter at Vayner Media. Stein found the job through LinkedIn while she had her filters set to look for open positions in the advertising industry.

When I interviewed Stein after she left the Times, she reflected on the experience, "In hindsight, I was probably naive about what a shift to a publisher would mean... I didn't quite understand the realities of working at a publisher." Her statement is indicative of the drastic cultural change the paper was undergoing during her time there. The Times craved the perspective and experience of advertisers; the organization wanted Stein's expertise to rub off on salespeople who were used to selling ad space. The new positions introduced valuable marketing skills to the sales department. News outlets never had to hire creatives, art directors, or copywriters. For the most part, they looked toward the ad industry's job descriptions to craft their own recruitment materials. This cultural shift was actually made explicit in the Times' leaked 2014 innovation report, which stated that the paper needed to change titles to attract fresh talent, and acknowledged that "Digital staffers want to play creative roles, not service roles." Previously, Stein's position had fallen under the title "sales support." When she said she didn't realize what a transition into publishing would mean, she was referring to the fact that while the Times had changed some of its job titles, its sales-first culture had not changed.

Lisa Harvey is a salesperson who has worked at The Atlantic and The New York Times; she was able to shed light on just how much has changed between 2015 and our present moment. "For me it went from something that was quite simple- a sale (such as) a straight print buy, or media plan... (to) 'What kind of story do you want to tell?'" In 2016, "It was like I had a different job. It was like they were speaking a different language." Harvey's experience was the same at both companies: the sales job was no longer selling space; she had to become a story-seller. Every salesperson I spoke with said they were selling ideas or stories now.

After publishers staffed up to handle the demands of producing branded content, the challenge became organizing the ways native ads would actually be produced. Vox, the Times, and The Atlantic created new product teams. These teams acted as liaisons between branded content studios and newsroom employees. People on product teams work closely with editors and reporters to see what projects they are working on and try to find ways to align advertisers with upcoming newsroom content.

One Linkedin page captured a trend I was seeing across the profiles of many product managers who work for news organizations. As one of their accomplishments, a product manager at a prominent magazine lists, "Partnered with editorial and marketing leadership to plan special projects and map out editorial/product calendar." This description may sound like jargon to the average reader, but it makes sense to people in the industry. To shed light on this trend I spoke with Ashley Neglia, who was the director of product marketing and ad innovation at The New York Times for three years. She said the role means "working in between the newsroom, product, and sales. My job is to work very closely with the newsroom as they come up with new ideas, and for me to determine what might be interesting to an advertiser. What might be sellable or sponsorable?" Neglia's response captures the special position product teams hold within the organizational structure of a news publisher. Previously, publications were made up of two entities: the newsroom and the business side of the operation. Product marketing works in the middle.

When news organizations create new teams like product marketing, they are able to skirt the implication that news staff work directly with brands to craft commercial content-something that would damage the publication's reputation and make its own brand identity less valuable. The product marketing team is responsible for the negotiation between publisher and advertiser. They shape the conversation with the newsroom and marketers, respectively.

If an editor wants to work on a culinary trends column, the product development team will consult various brands to see if a company wants to be associated with such content. For example, Vox sold Infiniti (the car company), a native advertising initiative that blended into Eater's culinary coverage. It was called The Museum of Food and Drink, and featured a series of articles outlining the latest trends in the culinary world. The native advertising campaign was labeled "Presented by Infiniti" (see Figure 1). It takes further digging to see the disclosure text that said news staff had no hand in creating the content (see Figure 2).

Every interview conducted as part of this report circled one question: is native advertising ethical if it looks like real news? Most subjects said they believe they craft ethical native advertisements. Almost everyone who defended the practice evoked the church and state axiom. They said their publisher understood the importance of keeping the newsroom (church) separate from the advertising department (state). However, a few people said they understood that native ads do present a threat to traditional newsroom values. Four people said sometimes publishers get it wrong. Pete Tosiello worked in The Atlantic's branded content studio and said the publisher did work on ads that had no place in journalism. Tosiello cited the native ad The Atlantic ran for the Church of Scientology in 2013. The ad outlined the growth of the Church and came out right before New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright's book Going Clear, an expose on the Church's hidden practices. It was created to offset the negative press generated from Wright's book. The publisher removed the native ad, and apologized for their poor judgment. Tosiello said that after stumbling over a few native ads they became more discerning and probably wouldn't make the same mistake today. When he discussed the practice he said it was essentially "Calling in world-class publications to effectively write press releases."

Many people said they didn't feel comfortable talking on the record about certain partnerships or how some deals are negotiated between the newsroom and marketers. Five different sales people from legacy news publishers said there were always avenues for advertisers to collaborate with the newsroom. They each discussed going on sales meetings with a popular journalist. If the wall between the newsroom and advertisers is as sturdy as most interviewees proclaimed, I was curious to see how they justified bringing journalists on sales calls.

Most interviewees said there is no conflict of interest because they align branded content with projects, columns, or articles their respective newsroom is already in the process of producing. A trend did emerge, people who adamantly defended the practice were employed by a publisher during the time I interviewed them. However, those who shared their skepticism about the trend had left the industry. Tracy Doyle worked at The New York Times, where she was creative director, for over two years. She put it in perspective-when asked how she felt about the ethics of native advertising, she simply said:

This is not in line with the campaign they are putting out that talks about the truth when they will turn around with another hand and take money from an advertiser to run an ad about fracking not being bad. We know that this is not the truth. This is what happens when you have glorified salespeople running The New York Times - their take-money-from-anyone mindset ultimately jeopardizes the journalistic integrity of the newspaper.

Doyle was referencing a native ad the legacy publisher created for Chevron. Beneath the header, " Innovation Unlocks Untapped Energy" readers saw the text, "more effective extraction techniques, such as hydraulic fracturing - unlocked vast, previously untappable reserves. In turn, ample supply has reduced natural gas prices to historic lows."

Despite the obvious problems with writing native ads that oppose the information coming out of a publisher's newsroom most interviewees defended the practice. Almost everyone I spoke to said native advertising is a valuable and necessary revenue stream for publishers. The dire economic state of the publishing industry seemed to offset any ethical concerns over the potential native ads have to confuse newsreaders. It is worth noting that many people who work in branded content studios used to be journalists. They are familiar with the values, rigor, and dedication reporters exercise when pursuing a story. Despite this desire to keep journalistic ethics intact while crafting native ads, the pressure to secure advertising revenue is substantial.

Denise Burrell-Stinson used to be a freelance journalist and is currently the head of storytelling at The Washington Post's branded content studio. In this role, she creates media for advertisers. This involves pitching clients' stories in the form of articles, videos, and podcasts. Burrell-Stinson actively works with clients, creates branded content, and sells story ideas by leveraging her past experience working as a journalist. She reminds brands that she has been trained to tell meaningful stories people care about for years. Burrell-Stinson has been at The Post over a year and has seen the company's culture intensify. "The mandate here is to up your game all the time . . . push the envelope, make it bigger," she said. Nearly everyone I spoke with mentioned the push to make work that has "never been done before."

Clients routinely ask Burrell-Stinson, Neglia, and Harvey to show them advertising opportunities that have never been offered to anyone else. This isn't a request; it's an ultimatum. Clients can go to an advertising agency if they simply want a thirty-second ad or Instagram post. Marketers work with publishers because they want to be associated with the trust people place in organizations like The Washington Post. They want commercials that don't strike readers as advertising at all, something that has never been done before.

Why Should We Pay Attention to Native Advertising?

Over 30 interviews, a common theme emerged: Clients have all the bargaining power. Marketers have well-established relationships with their ad agency of record and view news publishers as one piece of their larger promotional plan that can easily be jettisoned for another line-item on the budget. A client's agency of record is in the unique position to advise a brand on where they should spend their money- which platforms are worth valuable distribution dollars. This environment means news organizations have to build a relationship with advertisers, one that enables them to be more than a distribution line-item. The dynamic encourages product marketing teams to work directly with the newsroom to create original opportunities for brands to sponsor. When a product team can give a client an opportunity to embed their brand in or near news coverage, then the publisher becomes more than a simple distribution platform. Reporters, editors, and news workers will need to be equipped to address these new requests coming out of the business side of a newspaper as long as native advertising remains en vogue.

The economic pressure on newsrooms across the country has made branded content studios compete against one another for revenue. When publishers are asked to "push the envelope" of what is possible, the results benefits clients, not readers. Clients have consistently approached the people I interviewed and informed them that another publisher offered them a partnership closely aligned with one journalist's column, or a new type of sponsorship altogether. Then they asked the person I interviewed whether they can match the offer or enhance it in some way. For example, ad labels vary and clients can often push publishers to create a label that is vague, or none at all, if they show that another publisher is willing to offer the same vague or nonexistent label. Branded content that can be difficult to spot exists in events a publisher hosts, in the podcasts it produces, in a series of columns-indeed, it is present in every medium a publisher is using.

Every publisher in this study uses a data analytics company like Chartbeat or Parse.ly to measure how readers engage with their coverage; this data is used by both the newsroom and branded content studios. Studios are able to share this proprietary data with advertisers when they are trying to sell branded content around a specific topic like travel. Product managers often create partnerships around topics readers are most likely to engage with, determined using engagement data from readers' browsing patterns. Branded content producers interviewed for this study overwhelmingly said they wanted to make native ads that sound and look like the work produced by their respective newsroom-branded content that is "Times-ian" or sounds like an explainer article Vox's newsroom would write.

In the winter of 2017, The New York Times launched a native advertising initiative. The ad series was labeled, "An editorial residency with the support of Véa, a snack company owned by Mondelez." The text describing the residency itself was vague and wasn't written in the form of a normal job description: the Times had created a standalone website asking journalists with two to three years of experience to apply to a new editorial residency. The website hosting the application portal said, "As a New York Times reporter, you'll travel the country and the world seeking out others with fascinating identities, and share their stories with Times readers in an upcoming cultural series called Surfacing." At the bottom and top of this landing page the logo of the snack company appeared with the text "Supported by Véa" (see Figures 3 and 4).

This initiative, labeled as a residency, was actually Véa funding reporters to cover food, culture, and travel for New York Times readers.

As Jason Levine, vice president of marketing for Mondelez International, said in a press release for the native ad,

We are proud to help The New York Times empower a new era of journalists to uncover new experiences, seek out others with fascinating identities and share those authentic stories in real-time-an endeavor that truly resonates with and engages Véa fans.

Meanwhile, the Times newsroom was responsible for recruiting and training Véa residents to explore the world and create food, culture, and travel content within its Travel section, all led by the Times travel editor Monica Drake. In the same release, Sebastian Tomich, senior vice president of advertising and innovation at The New York Times, said:

We're excited to work with the Véa brand because their spirit of exploration and presence is very much aligned with the kinds of stories that curious Times readers come to us for day after day. We're looking for the next generation of passionate and thoughtful creators who are pushing the boundaries on how to tell stories and how to tap into what's at the core of culture right now.

The Véa residency blurs the boundary between newsroom content and advertising messaging by centrally placing Véa's brand in the context of a real reporting job description. Further, there was no clear label identifying the content as an advertisement. It's important to note the product marketing team that helps craft these deals between advertisers and the newsroom report directly to Tomich. But these product teams are only one part of the story. There are also former journalists who craft commercial messages for advertisers.

Native Advertising and Journalism

The rise of native advertising leads to other questions about the state of journalism that news organizations haven't been addressed fully:

Should reporters share what they are working on with product marketing teams? When the newsroom works with product teams-whether simply by consulting on journalistic standards or by partnering more deeply- its knowledge and expertise get commodified and shared with advertisers in an effort to create branded content.

Does native advertising affect how real news stories are crafted and delivered?

Does native advertising challenge the supposition of objectivity accorded to modern reporting?

Does native advertising taint or otherwise undercut the relationship between publishers and the readers who trust them for independent coverage of companies that may buy advertising from them?

These questions pose new challenges for news workers. News organizations have never placed such a premium on the data they have about readers, or the targeting capabilities publishers can implement. Today, reporters are well aware that they need to keep readers on an article page. This allows publishers to tell advertisers they have a healthy audience of engaged readers, reachable through ad placements that look like news stories. Research has shown newsrooms know they have to keep readers on article pages and actively engaging with content; this knowledge can shape reporting decisions. What is clear in this study is that journalists see that branded content generates revenue and thus secures the future of their publication and consequently their job. Pete Tosiello worked in The Atlantic's branded content studio and said the need for ad revenue was visible on both the business and newsroom side of the publication. "There were pressures to band together. In some cases popular reporters came to sales meetings." They came to these meetings to try and help close ad deals. Reporters may not negotiate the price of a native ad, but they are certainly recognize the importance of these conversations.

Native Advertising & News Readers

In 2015, content marketing company Contently conducted an in-depth study that showed hundreds of people a combination of editorial and clearly labeled native ads. The company,which has a financial interest in ensuring that native advertising remains popular and profitable, found that "most consumers identified the native ad as an article. That includes native ads on The Wall Street Journal (80 percent identified it as an article), The New York Times (71 percent), BuzzFeed (71 percent), and Forbes (65 percent)."

Advertisers invest in branded content and native advertising because they are said to capture the valuable attention of readers. People engage with native ads for a variety of reasons; they may find the content intriguing, or they may not realize it is a commercial message.

News publishers try to sell the status, reputation, and aura of their newsroom and the reporting skills of their investigative journalists to create a case for why advertisers should trust news publishers to craft commercial messages. The premise of native content studios is that they are able to use the same skills journalists utilize to tell compelling stories and engage readers.These studios employ former journalists, pay them well, and show marketers that ads crafted by news publishers will be executed with the same level of care as news stories. Employees can also transfer between the newsroom and branded content studio of same publisher. It's important to note here that the majority of native ads don't have bylines, making it easy for journalists at a publisher to write commercial content without readers knowing. This trend means former journalists are able to leverage their skill sets in advertising departments across major newspapers. The question then becomes, what if it works? What if readers find native advertising to be just as compelling and persuasive as real news?

Brandon Keenen, senior director at BuzzFeed, answered this question:

Our branded content at times outperforms our editorial content. It really just depends on the content. We don't see a massive drop-off on branded content, so it's a great opportunity for brands to engage with the audience and a community in a way that there's no lesser value in because it's branded or promoted by. It's really important to keep it authentic and to make sure that the content resonates with the audience regardless if there's a brand or not.

Audience development teams work directly with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to ensure people are reading native ads. Articles coming out of the newsroom have their own audience development teams that share the same skill set: optimizing headlines, imagery, and text. However, each real news story is not amplified to get a specific number of clicks. But branded content studios have promised clients a specific number of clicks and thus have a financial obligation to amplify commercial messages.

This can come at the cost of promoting editorial content, since both real news stories and native ads are competing for a reader's attention. Yogini Patel was an ad optimization coordinator at BuzzFeed, where she was tasked with ensuring branded content performed well and attracted reader attention. When asked how she worked with the newsroom to promote branded content, she said reporters would share information about what people clicked on, the time of day posts should be put up, and so forth. She also said, "We were talking to them [the newsroom] before posting anything."

By consulting with the newsroom, Yogini knew when to post content and could make sure the newsroom was not covering similar stories. This check-in with the newsroom ensured her branded content stories would receive as many clicks as possible; they wouldn't come out at the same time the newsroom was running a comparable story.

Some of the largest criticisms of native advertising are focused on disclosure and transparency. Regulators and publishers consider native ads ethical if they are labeled clearly. Upholding clear discourse standards is predicated on the assumption that if readers know they are reading commercial messages, because the ad is clearly labeled, then native advertising as a practice can't be deceptive.

The Limitations of Current Regulation

In theory, the disclosure mandated by FTC regulation shields readers from being tricked or misled into reading commercial content and thinking it was produced by a journalist. However, complete transparency is not a proactively enforced legal standard, as evidenced by the fact that many publishers do not follow the FTC's laws on native advertising.

MediaRadar is an advertising intelligence company that tracks where ads are placed and sells that information to ad agencies, brands, and media companies. In 2017, the company reviewed more than 12,000 pieces of native content across a variety of publisher websites and found that 40 percent of native advertisements ignore the FTC's regulations.

The company also found that nearly two out of five publishers creating native ads are not compliant with FTC's guidelines. There is a distinction here that is easy to miss: the study did not find that brands themselves are being deceptive. Rather, the publishers making the native advertisements are not following the FTC's rules. These rules do not provide publishers with standard wording for disclosure, though. Publishers use different labels to mark native content, which can be confusing to readers. A single publisher,

The Atlantic uses a variety of labels: "Crafted by," "Presented by," and in one case simply "With." In a branded content campaign for Nest, The Atlantic's branded content studio worked with PSFK- a research company- to create a custom research report that stated the benefits of using Nest products. The report, "Home Debrief" simply said "PSFK with The Atlantic " (see Figure 5).

Minimizing disclosure up to, and potentially even beyond, the legal standard of transparency adds a fatal layer of confusion to a world of public information that already confounds a skeptical, digital-native readership. Sarah McGrew co-directs the Civic Online Reasoning project at Stanford University and conducted a study on native advertising that looked at how high school students respond to this form of commercial content. Researchers presented high school students with screenshots of two articles on global climate change. One screenshot was a traditional news story from a magazine's science section. The other was a post sponsored by an oil company, which was labeled sponsored content and prominently displayed the company's logo. The students were asked to identify which source was more reliable. Almost 70 percent said the sponsored content screenshot, which contained a chart with data, was more reliable.

The findings indicated that students were often fooled by the eye-catching pie chart in the oil company's post, despite the fact that there was no evidence that the chart represented reliable data. One student said that the oil company's article was more reliable because, "It's easier to understand with the graph and seems more reliable because the chart shows facts right in front of you." Only 15 percent of students concluded that the news article was the more trustworthy source of the two screenshots.

If native advertising convinces readers that brand stories are factual, informative, and worth reading, then journalists have something to worry about. The novel problem native advertising presents may be what happens when people interpret ads as journalistic and trustworthy even when they are clearly labeled as sponsored content. McGrew's research captures an essential part of this conversation: disclosure might not be the primary problem. Rather, the problem with native advertising is that it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do-it looks as trustworthy and well-reported as a real news story. The BBC's branded content studio explicitly says it is "the creative studio with newsroom values . . . embodying the BBC's creative spark and rigorous editorial quality to help brands connect through beautifully crafted storytelling." Branded content studios are selling their ability to produce content that looks just as believable as real news stories. McGrew's study proves that branded content studios are delivering on this promise to their clients. Producers of native content know they are in the business of copying whichever strategies and tactics the newsroom deploys to maintain reader trust.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this study is that when students were given a side-by-side comparison between a native ad and a real news story, they didn't simply think the native ad was better, they thought it was more trustworthy because it had a compelling data visualization.

Advertisers pour money into making content that looks virtually identical to real news; social media experts then sit within branded content studios where they test each native advertising headline and potential image, all in an effort to make sure readers are clicking. Editorial departments have audience development teams as well, which test and optimize headlines, but the newsroom doesn't need to hit a certain number of readers per article. News publishers also work to amplify news across social media platforms, but again they don't have to meet specific click-through goals. Exposure aside, regulatory efforts may be focused on the wrong issues. The problem shouldn't be limited to discussions that emphasize the importance of disclosure, labels, and media literacy.

When brands are armed with real-time newsroom data showing what people are engaging with, ads can be instantly updated and served. Regulation around native advertising should also require that publishers have readers open commercial content in an entirely new browser window, with a URL that has "advertiser content" in the name instead of "paid-post/nytimes.com," for example.

Eye-catching content, created by storytelling experts and funded by a brand, may actually be taking readers away from reading the editorial content independent newsrooms create. When brands work with publishers to create branded content they are promised a specific number of clicks or engagement. Publishers then have to promote the branded content they've created on their website and on social media platforms to meet the promised number of clicks. Therefore, it is entirely possible that people will see a branded content story before they see a real news article because publishers are paying platforms to promote commercial messages, not newsroom articles.

Every time a deal is negotiated between an advertiser and a publisher's branded content studio, a specific number of clicks or engagement metrics are promised to the client. Branded content studios have a contract to deliver clients with the pre-established engagement metrics. Newsroom reporters aren't contractually obligated to hit a specified number of clicks on their articles; especially at legacy publications like The New York Times. However, branded content studios are contractually obligated to hit specified engagement metrics when working with marketers. If by working with publishers advertisers are winning out in securing reader attention through native ads, this has the potential to undermine an important mission of news organizations: maintaining an informed public.

Conclusion: What Should We Do?

The resounding theme in these interviews was the overwhelming desire people had to defend the native ads created inside a publishers' branded content division. Nearly everyone said native ads provide value to readers or at least that is the goal of this type of marketing. Burrell-Stinson, of the Washington Post, said that there is a shared mission between the newsroom and branded content producers: "The content that does the best feels like good storytelling. People who come from real newsrooms... they bring the best talent and authority." She went on to explain that hiring journalists enables branded content studios to show that they can produce work that is just as compelling as what comes out of newsrooms.

Her response seems to skirt the question many people have: is the wall between reporters and advertisers still sturdy? Burrell-Stinson's response encapsulates what many other native advertising practitioners have said-that great stories can be told on either side of the wall. When asked about ethical considerations, people adamantly stated that the ultimate goal of branded content is similar to that of a newsroom-to produce compelling stories. Practitioners did not feel the line between newsroom and commercial content was being blurred; almost everyone thought there was no reason brands shouldn't create content that is just as thoughtfully put together as their publication's news copy. Lisa Harvey, Denise Burrell-Stinson, Ashley Neglia, each clearly stated that they work with clients whose mission and story is closely aligned with the publisher that employs them. It would be easy to think branded content producers are behaving recklessly, and some people who used to work in the industry agree. But current producers of branded content don't seem to reject ethical concerns, they simply don't think commercial content threatens the independence of the newsroom.

These assertions fly in the face of established research on audience behavior. The very thing that gives this form of marketing power is its capacity to blend, to camouflage itself in any given environment-the commercial's ability to be native.

Publishers depend on advertising revenue to support news gathering and production. This economic truth is no longer new. Native advertising shares many similarities with print advertorials-ads that were made to look like editorial content and had a small label at the top of the page marking them "advertorials" or "sponsored content" or a "special advertising section." As with their digital decendents, this label was easy to miss when readers flipped through magazines and saw yet another page that looked like a news column. But the way native digital advertising is being made is unprecedented.

A senior editor at Digiday wrote, "The difference between an advertorial and a native ad lies in the content. Publishers are building out creative services teams [ The Atlantic has a staff of 15; BuzzFeed has nearly 20] to help brands create content that fits the voice of the outlet, whereas advertorials don't necessarily match up"

Advertorials aren't written by news publishers; clients or their ad agency provides the news outlet with text, words, and images. Native ads are different because they are produced within the walls of a news publisher from start to finish. When the voice of an advertiser mimics the authoritative and trustworthy voice of journalists, it is clear that something new is happening. Research shows that readers consistently mistake native advertisements for news stories. We've also seen that regulating the labeling of commercial content is difficult to enforce. While these findings may paint a dark future for news, they also present readers with a unique opportunity to demand more transparency from news outlets. If enough readers voice their concerns about branded content, news outlets will have to respond. At the moment, many readers are confused by native ads because they don't realize how prevalent they are and just how much they blend into the look and tone of news stories. However, if more people become aware of the trend and its prevalence at trusted newspapers, they may be more willing to demand transparency in exchange for subscription dollars.

Acknowledgments

This report would not have been possible without the support of Emily Bell and the Tow Center. Thanks to Elizabeth Watkins for her keen understanding of the digital ad space and critical eye that greatly helped refine my own thinking. Thanks to Sam Thielman and Pete Brown for their patience, thoughtful comments, and razor-sharp edits.

Thank you to all of the people inside publishing and media who allowed me to interview them, their perspective added much-needed nuance to this report. Finally, I'd like to thank Professor Michael Schudson, Professor Andie Tucher, Professor Rodney Benson, and Professor Sam Freedman for their continuous support of my work on this topic.

Notes

NYT Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, April 25, 2017.

Buzzfeed Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, February 2, 2017.

Tosiello Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, July 21, 2019.

Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants from the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold. London: Atlantic Books, 2016.

Chaffey, Dave. "Average Display Advertising Clickthrough Rates." Smart Insights, April 16, 2019.

McLellan, Michele. The Rise of Native Ads in Digital News Publications. Report. Entrepreneurial Journalism, Tow-Knight.

O'Reilly, Lara. "Ad Blocker Usage Is up 30% - and a Popular Method Publishers Use to Thwart It Isn't Working." Business Insider. January 31, 2017. Accessed April 29, 2018.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-report-2017-1.

Rittenhouse, Lindsay. "The New York Times Hires JWT N.Y. Chief Creative Officer Ben James for Its Branded Content Studio." Adweek, March 29, 2019.

ATTN Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, October 12, 2017.

Benton, Joshua. "The Leaked New York Times Innovation Report Is One of the Key Documents of This Media Age." Nieman Lab, May 14, 2014.

Atlantic Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, October 15, 2018.

Melissa, Melissa. "@Theincogneatist." Instagram, n.d.

Tosiello Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, July 21, 2019.

Doyle Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, July 26, 2018.

"Stories That Influence The Influential." T Brand Studio, n.d.
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"The New York Times Surfacing Residency." The New York Times, n.d.

Christin, Angèle. "Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France." American Journal of Sociology 123, no. 5 (2018).
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Tosiello Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, July 21, 2019.

Lazauskas, Joe. "The Problems Facing Native Advertising, in 5 Charts." The Content Strategist. September 24, 2015. Accessed April 29, 2018.
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Silverman, Jacob. "The Rest Is Advertising: Jacob Silverman." The Baffler, July 3, 2019.

Hannay, Megan. "Local Journalism, Meet Branded Content: What the Decline in Print Means for Brands." Marketing Land, August 17, 2016.

Buzzfeed Interview. Ava Sirrah. Phone interview. New York, February 2, 2017.

Fletcher, Paul. "Report: Nearly 40% Of Publishers Ignore FTC's Native Advertising Rules." Forbes. March 20, 2017. Accessed April 29, 2018.

Fletcher, Paul. "Report: Nearly 40% Of Publishers Ignore FTC's Native Advertising Rules." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, March 20, 2017.

Storyworks". 2019. Https://Www.Bbcglobalnews.Ltd/Solutions/Bbc-Storyworks/.
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"Article or Ad? When It Comes to Native Advertising, No One Knows." Contently, February 1, 2017.

Lawson, Linda. Truth in Publishing: the Newspaper Publicity Act as Government Regulation of the Press. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1989.

Amazeen, Michelle A, and Bartosz W Wojdynski. "The Effects of Disclosure Format on Native Advertising Recognition and Audience Perceptions of Legacy and Online News Publishers." Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, July 2018.
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Ava Sirrah is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University's journalism school where she researches how advertisers shape news production and dissemination. Prior to entering academia, she worked at The New York Times as a creative strategist.

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The news industry is full of ideas when it comes to experimenting with new storytelling formats and techniques-podcasts, virtual reality, Instagram posts. The list is long, but storytelling across these media and platforms is something the journalism-adjacent advertising industry has been experimenting with for decades. Complex ad-measurement metrics now demonstrate, in granular detail, [...]

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https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/

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The currency of the New Economy won't be money, but attention-a radical theory of value.

As is now obvious, the economies of the industrialized nations-and especially that of the US-have shifted dramatically. We've turned a corner toward an economy where an increasing number of workers are no longer involved directly in the production, transportation, and distribution of material goods, but instead earn their living managing or dealing with information in some form. Most call this an "information economy."

Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce-especially on the net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the internet without the hope of obtaining some. It's called attention. And the economy of attention-not information-is the natural economy of cyberspace.

Attention has its own behavior, its own dynamics, its own consequences. An economy built on it will be different than the familiar material-based one. For the past decade I have been exploring how this new system will work. This article is a rough outline of where we are headed.

Technically, at least, information and its flow can be accurately detected and counted (in bits, bytes, and baud rates) by simple electronic devices. Attention is more mysterious, a process that can occur only in a mind, yet somehow it moves out into the world as well. If you're in a phone conversation, your attention goes to the party at the other end of the line. If you're chatting over the net, your attention flows through it. The flow may be metaphoric, but it is a metaphor of uncommon depth. Phrases such as "pay attention" and "I can't give you my full attention right now" trip easily off our tongues-almost as if this state of awareness were a substance.

"Attention," write Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun in their 1996 book Rules of the Net, "is the hard currency of cyberspace." They're dead on. As the net becomes an increasingly strong presence in the overall economy, the flow of attention will not only anticipate the flow of money, but eventually replace it altogether.

Though it might sound peculiar at first, attention as the basis of a new economy really does work. To begin with, attention addresses a fundamental human desire. Let's suppose you woke up one morning, well supplied with food and other material essentials, but invisible and inaudible, unable to get noticed in any way at all. At first, it could be quite amusing to spy and eavesdrop, to see what you're not supposed to. But no matter what you discovered, not being able to share your encounters with anyone would soon become torture-itself a pain you couldn't express to anyone. Living without feedback, even in the lap of luxury, would be for all but a few recluses barely living at all.

Some minimum of attention is essential. While many of us crave huge amounts of recognition, the lure is not merely fame or a place in history. It's also praise from the people around you for what you do. The internet is an amazing expression of these desires. People log on to connect with others, gossip, debate, advise, and learn about those like or unlike themselves. They log on to exchange attention. And, not surprisingly, anyone who has spent an appreciable amount of time on the net has advice about paying attention. In his online book Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold lays out two guidelines: "Rule Number One is to pay attention. Rule Number Two might be: Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."

But how does attention come to dominate the emerging economy? Any conventional economist will tell you that ordinary material products are scarce and presumably always will be. Technically, that might be true, but in practice, mass production spews forth so much that there's a shift in emphasis away from the material desires that dominated the old economy. For many people in the US, Western Europe, Japan, and a growing list of other places, the materials needed for basic living are more than abundant. To take one small example, in the US food is so cheap and plentiful that eating too much is considered more of a concern than getting too little.

Attention is different. It really is scarce, and the total amount per capita is strictly limited. To see why, consider yours, right now. It's going to these words. No matter how brilliant or savvy at multitasking you are, you can't be focusing on very much else. Ultimately then, the attention economy is a zero-sum game. What one person gets, someone else is denied.

As it happens, I have conflicting feelings about what this implies. I happen to favor equality-equal distribution of the world's wealth. But I also like getting recognition. I can't have it both ways. The size of the attention pie can grow as more and more people join the world audience, but the size of the average slice can't. Real attention to you, meaning minds focusing on you, is always limited by the number of minds there are. The more minds, the more attention-but also the more who might want attention. The total available attention per capita (per mind) is simply not going to change.

Howard Rheingold offers two guidelines on attention. Rule One: Pay attention. Rule Two: Pay attention to where you pay attention.

To summarize, attention can ground an economy because it is a fundamental human desire and is intrinsically, unavoidably scarce. It can be a rich and complex economy because attention comes in many forms: love, recognition, heeding, obedience, thoughtfulness, caring, praising, watching over, attending to one's desires, aiding, advising, critical appraisal, assistance in developing new skills, et cetera. An army sergeant ordering troops doesn't want the kind of attention Madonna seeks. And neither desires the sort I do as I write this. There are also many ways to capture attention: via your thoughts, inventions, self-revelations, expressions, performances, artistic creations, achievements, pleas, and arresting appearances.

There is one further wrinkle. Attention goes both ways, even when information doesn't. Suppose you run into Sam, an old acquaintance. The dialog might go: "How are you?" "Just fine." You may not be any wiser for the small talk, but you've exchanged attention. If you truly want your question answered, Sam's honest reply would be attentive to your desire to know. Each time someone focuses directly or indirectly on anybody else, that can be thought of as a "transaction" in this new economy-a transaction that usually doesn't involve money.

What about this transaction now, where attention flows from a reading audience to an individual? Is it also flowing from me to you? In reality it's not, but if I don't make you feel that I'm writing for you to some extent, what would keep you reading? Whenever you pay attention to someone, you have to be getting at least some illusory attention back.

The key point about the various forms and avenues of attention is that while we each want it to some extent, it does not arrive in equal measure. This explains why many of us are working harder and harder to get some, and why we eagerly latch onto technologies such as the internet and the Web. Cyberspace affords new opportunities for capturing attention that might otherwise dissipate. It promises nearly everyone a chance at attention from millions, the potential to be noticed by the largest possible audience-or by an audience of peers whose attention we value most. But the net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource. At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.

Keeping attention transactions equitable in the future will be no easier than keeping cash transactions equitable today. A spendthrift will allow a few people to monopolize her attention. Or she may even lavish it on someone who can't give it back-say, Elvis, or an ancestor. Remember Rheingold's advice: Pay attention to where you pay attention.

That's because the attention economy is a star system, where Elvis has an advantage. The relationship between stars and fans is central. Even without cyberspace, celebrities in show business, politics, and every other discipline accumulate huge amounts of notice. Over a billion tune into TV specials like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards. TV networks claim that two and half billion people watched the funeral of Princess Diana.

But suppose you aren't a star like Elvis or Princess Di. Does that mean you'll be impoverished in the coming economy? Maybe not. Cyberspace offers a much more effective means of continuing and completing attention transactions, as well as opening up more possibilities to almost everyone. Whoever you are, however you express yourself, you can now have a crack at the global audience. Most likely you will also see people picking stars (and microstars) and becoming part of their "entourages." In cyberspace, this might mean you set up and run a fan site, or help design or maintain a complex cybercommunity, such as Geocities, where subsections of the site have their own webmasters. If you're a software programmer, for example, you might seek out some visionary codemaster who excites you. She will probably build a rather large entourage, and since you are in her circle, some of that attention will be diverted to you, the upcoming microstar.

Attention flows not only from fan to star, but in a hyperlinked way it can be passed from star to star, or fan to fan. A growing variety of attention types can bounce along through cyberspace: personal advice, suggestions, connections, editing, assistance in self-expression, responses, acclaim, or new software designed especially for your purposes. More gets more. Someone can pay you attention by helping you track down a specific fact (or create some special effect) that will help you get still more notice. Of course, you can earn negative attention as well, such as flaming, shaming, and outright hatred. But as many a disobedient child knows, negative attention can be better than none at all. On the Web, if you're adept, you can use notoriety to bring more notice to yourself.

And here's where it gets interesting: attention can't be bought. When advertisers pay for an ad, for example, they are guaranteed only a chance at an audience's notice. Audience members learn to ignore or turn off all but the most interesting ads, and even then they may not focus on what's being advertised. In fact, as the attention economy becomes dominant, the advertising industry won't exist as it does today, since its point is to induce people to spend money. In the future, ads will exist only to attract and direct attention, because money will be obsolete.

Let me attempt to make this outlandish thought easier to swallow. To begin with, cyberspace is not that hospitable to monetary transactions. Electronic money (in the form of digital bits) requires a complex set of codes, passwords, firewalls, et cetera. Attention requires no encryption. It flows naturally across the Web.

Second, if you get attention, that means you have some control over both the thoughts and actions of those paying it to you. Think of a panda. When you started reading this article, you had no idea this black-and-white mammal would enter your thoughts. (Or did you notice a hint in the illustration?) Did you just turn the page back to check? Some readers did. Their action came under my control because of the attention they gave me. Someone better at this than me, someone who "enthralls" an audience, is in quite a real sense temporarily making the audience members her "thralls"-or, slaves. The very act of paying attention may seem voluntary, but often it is not completely so. There is a definite element of compulsion involved. It's no coincidence that people say things like, "I have to check out that Web site," "You've gotta watch that show," or "That book is a must read." And each of those activities takes physical as well as mental effort.

Already today, no matter what you do, the money you receive is more and more likely to track the recognition that comes to you for doing what you do. If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won't get noticed, and that increasingly means you won't get paid much either.

As the attention economy becomes dominant, advertising will exist only to attract and direct attention, because money will be obsolete.

This trend in recompense in the US has been documented in The Winner-Take-All Society, a book by economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook. The authors note that the star system we are accustomed to in sports, entertainment, and the arts has migrated to the professions. As a September 3, 1997, front-page headline in The Wall Street Journal announced, "CEOs are stars now." That's how they are paid, hired, utilized, and dismissed. They operate within their companies more as attention-getting motivators than bosses. The same goes for rainmaking legal partners, high-powered lobbyists, and academics. More and more they are treated as celebrities. When they leave, they leave like stars, taking their entourages in tow. At the other extreme, ordinary line workers, fast-food servers, custodians, and others who don't particularly stand out have found their relative financial standing eroding. In times past, you could be obscure yet secure-now that's harder.

But how exactly will a moneyless attention economy play out in the world of old-fashioned, but still-needed, material goods? How will attention get you, say, an automobile? Cars emanate from vast corporations. Can you really expect an entity like GM to pay you enough attention to build one for you? In truth, the process is not nearly so monolithic; no single company makes cars in isolation. Automobile designs are copied, reverse-engineered, or licensed, and parts are often made by smaller outside workshops. Much of the advice, planning, and management comes from outside consultants. The car is no longer assembled from parts on one long assembly line; rather, subassemblies are often put together in different locations first. At every stage, more and more tasks are automated; that means more of the attention required to make a car occurs upstream as part of design and production planning.

With most people involved in the entire process connected to each other and to the rest of the world through cyberspace, it is not difficult to foresee a time when corporations will pretty much disappear, and when it will make a lot more sense to speak of a complex carmaking community, made up mostly of entourages surrounding thousands of stars and microstars. As is common among entourages, much participation would be less than full time, and the majority of members would belong to other communities as well, and even to other entourages.

Thus many people in the broad car community will also share membership in some of the same communities of attention as anyone who might want a car. As long as the person in question gets enough attention, she would almost certainly be able to draw enough from overlaps between her primary communities and the car community to arrange to be put into the driver's seat she craves. Assuming automation keeps cutting the total amount of actual attention needed to make each individual car, less and less stardom will be required to end up with one.

In cyberspace, there is nothing natural about large-scale divisions like cities, nations, bureaucracies, and corporations. The only divisions, and rough ones at that, are among audiences, entourages, and what could be called attention communities. Each community is centered on some topic and usually includes a number of stars, along with their fans. Attention flows from community to community. Below this primary exchange will flow the less important exchange of goods and materials.

History offers a parallel for understanding this radical notion of an attention economy superseding the use of money. At the height of the feudal order in Europe, everyone took for granted that tilling the soil would always be primary, and that wealth and property would always depend on possessing the right bloodlines to own title to land (which could never be sold). It was unimaginable to either serfs or nobles that nobility and titles could cease to be a means to wealth. They were all that counted then. Yet, as the industrial economy developed, food production became just another industry, and not even a highly important one. Bloodlines lost significance as well, except for pedigreed dogs and racehorses. Something that had hardly existed-money-became the basis of a new economy. And, incidentally, the most gorgeous armor, the most magnificent knightly tournaments, and the greatest interest in noble lineage all took place just as feudalism was on its way out.

If you prefer to think in more numerical terms, ponder this: transactions in which money is involved may be growing in total number, but the total number of global attention transactions is growing even faster. By attention transactions I mean occasions when attention is paid to someone who can possibly make some use of having it, or is able to pass it on to someone else. People trade attention at work, at home, and in between, day in and day out. Anyone tied into the Web might make hundreds of such transactions a day, far more than the number of monetary transactions they are likely to be involved in.

The rise of the attention economy has a parallel: at the height of the feudal order in Europe, bloodlines and titles were replaced by a new form of wealth-money.

The attention economy is something real, and like every real economy, it has its shortcomings. Among its problems are these: 1. The danger of huge inequality between stars and fans; 2. The possibility that increasing demand for our limited attention will keep us from reflecting, or thinking deeply (let alone enjoying leisure); 3. The possibility that we will be so engrossed by efforts to capture our attention that we will shortchange those around us, especially children.

Beyond these problems, there are many more changes to expect as the attention economy grows in power. Here are some that come to mind first:

As the flow of attention becomes more important, so will cyberspace.

The importance of stars will increase, with a corresponding decline in power for those who insist on anonymity.

A lessening role for large organizations, because they can't focus or trade attention easily.

The same goes for governments, whose role will diminish as well.

Almost everyone will have a personal Web site.

For a secure old age, you will not want to rely entirely on Social Security or any kind of investment, monetary savings, or pension fund.

In projects of all kinds, comprehensive lists of credits for everyone involved will become as common and necessary as in Hollywood films now.

To thrive in the coming century, you will have to look beyond money in any form and build a stock of attention for yourself as best you can. This will not be an easy current to swim in. But don't be distracted. The most gorgeous castles of capitalism, the most colorful ceremonies of payment and receivables, the most elaborate rituals around money and investments are now at their height, just as the era of the money economy expires. For better or worse, the attention economy will prevail.

Michael H. Goldhaber (mgoldh@well.com) is the author of Reinventing Technology and a visiting scholar at the Institue for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley. He's completing a book on the attention economy.

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The New Economy Doesn't Want Your Money-Just Your Attention

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Attention is a fundamental desire that's intrinsically, unavoidably scarce. History can help us understand this radical theory of value.

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https://wearesocial.com/au/blog/2022/02/digital-2022-australia-online-like-never-before/

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The launch of the Digital 2022 Australia report gives us the opportunity to examine the online behaviour of Australians over the past year. If you thought 2020 heralded a shift in how we engaged with social media, online gaming and the internet, 2021 politely requests that you hold its beer.

By the start of 2022, Aussies were spending more time and money online than ever before. If we weren't indulging in social shopping or challenging our friends to rounds of multiplayer games, we were endlessly scrolling through a variety of social platforms. In fact, our uptake of social media is now disproportionate to the total population growth, driven by another year of pandemic lockdowns and necessary social isolation. As society begins to reopen in the age of vaccine boosters, which behaviours will stay and which return to their IRL analogues remains to be seen.

And now, without further ado, let's dig up some interesting titbits.

TikTok don't stop

By the end of 2021, 82.7% of Australians were active on social media, an annual growth of nearly 1 million users. As time spent on social media increased to 1h and 57m per day it became the second most popular media activity for Australians after watching television.

This increase was driven primarily by TikTok, now a social media staple of 32% of the 16-64 set. Australian TikTok users scroll through the app for 23.4 hours per month - a whopping 40% jump since the beginning of 2021. Meanwhile, the Facebook - ahem, Meta - properties either stalled or shrunk their social growth: Instagram grew 3% while Facebook and Whatsapp dropped 3% and 4% respectively.

This wasn't enough to knock Facebook from its throne, though. With 76.8% of social media users still hopping on, it's the most used platform in Australia, followed by Facebook Messenger in silver position with 66.4% and Instagram taking home the bronze with 57.7%. TikTok now sits comfortably at #8, beating out Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

The uptake of TikTok speaks volumes to the type of content and interactions users are drawn to. The authenticity of its subcultures and creators' content is captivating a new audience and keeping them engaged for longer. The rise of the TikTok influencer suggests that there's no stopping the platform for now.

Gaming away the lockdown days

At the start of 2021, music streaming was up by 20%. Over the course of the year, our entertainment needs evolved to feature an increased focus on interactivity. In short, gaming became king.

75.2% of internet users play games on any device, but the use of - and demand for - VR headsets and handheld gaming devices all grew, as anyone who tried to buy a Nintendo Switch will tell you. On average, +13 additional minutes was spent gaming on a console. Gaming even became a form of passive entertainment for 18.8% of Australians who spent time watching gaming videos online each week. Spending on video games also increased by +25%, rising to roughly AU$1B (US$717M) per year.

Beyond gaming, digital device ownership continued to grow with smartwatches (+7.3%), streaming devices (+3.0%), virtual reality devices (+9.5%) and feature phones (+22.9%) leading the charge. Of course, since we bought them we aimed to get the most out of them - time spent on all digital activities increased by an average of +15m.

e-Shopping e-Spree

Not only did Australians spend more time online in 2021, but we also splashed more cash on mobile applications and in-app purchases.

Collectively we downloaded 788 million apps during the year and spent AUD$3.24 billion (USD$2.31 billion) both on and in them, a +21% increase year-on-year. We also spent +25% more on subscriptions and downloads across video games, on-demand video, books and music, as we searched for ways to fill the time during lockdown.

67.7% of Australians made a purchase on the internet in 2021, with over half buying something online each week. On average, this worked out to roughly AUD$2,766 (USD$1,968) per person per year, a rise of 19%. As could be expected, e-commerce saw the greatest expenditure increase in food (+64%), personal and household care (+30%) and toys and hobbies (+30%) categories, with COVID isolation protocols driving this growth - when you can't go to the shops, you get the shops to come to you.

2021's numbers paint a picture of a society grappling with the second year of COVID-based isolation. Collectively we burrowed deeper into the digital realm, seeking new platforms and media to while away the time and stay connected with friends and family. What remains to be seen is how a return to IRL activities merge with our new digital habits as we gradually gain the upper hand over COVID-19, and how brands will leverage the opportunity.

If you'd like to chat about what this could mean for your brand, and how to gain an advantage over your competition, feel free to drop us a line.

Now if you'd like to get all the delicious data from the Digital 2022 Australia report, check it out below, or find more global stats in the Digital 2022 Global report here.

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DIGITAL 2022 AUSTRALIA: ONLINE LIKE NEVER BEFORE - We Are Social Australia

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All the data, trends, and insights you need to help you understand how people use the internet, mobile, social media, and ecommerce in Australia.

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00813-0_1

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The Information Society

According to legend, Abraham Lincoln was willing to walk several miles in order to borrow a book while growing up in Indiana during the early nineteenth century. "My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read," young Lincoln is reported to have said. Literature was scarce, difficult to access, and precious. Not only literature but information in general was hard to come by. Whether news from afar, new knowledge and insight, or simple entertainment, it usually took effort and came at considerable expense to get hold of information.

Just a few years ago, information was much more difficult to get hold of than it is today. Being well-informed depended on subscribing to a newspaper, heading out to buy one, or going to the library. Digitization and information technology have changed all this. Today, a smartphone is enough: access to any information of choice, let it be news, politics, or scientific results; literature, entertainment, or gossip; or endearing baby pictures or cute cat videos. Never before has so much information been so easily accessible.

The hallmark of the information age is not that we are all in continuous pursuit of precious information hard to access, but the other way around: The information age offers so much information that drowning in it, or chocking on it, is the risk. The vast offer of freely available information online has made the value of information drop steeply. People grown up with the Internet expect to get their information for free and refuse to pay for newspapers, books, or entertainment products. Not too many people would be willing to walk for miles to get hold of a book in this day and age.

The Price of Information

The easy access to overwhelming amounts of information, and the fact that often you don't have to pay money for it, doesn't mean that information comes for free; to receive information, we pay attention. You may have access to loads information, but in order to take it in, process it, and possibly act on it, you spend your attention on it. Project Gutenberg has made more than 53,000 books freely accessible online. If you read a book a day, it will take you 145 years to get through a library that size. If you prefer video, 400 h are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The challenge today is not to find something to read or information to pay attention to; it is to find the time to read or look at the material at your disposal.

With information in abundance comes an attention deficit. As early as 1971, Nobel Prize Laureate in economics Herbert Simon prophetically said about the information age to come:

The fact that information consumes attention makes attention a valuable resource. The information taken in is the basis of our experience and knowledge and deliberation, decision, and action.

Attention is a curious resource compared to economical means since it is more equitably distributed. Surely, some people can concentrate longer and more intensively than others. All the same, there are only marginal differences in the amount of attention each of us can spend. Attention cannot be accumulated and saved like money for a rainy day. In our waking hours, we constantly spend our attention: We are always attentive to something. A common feature of both attention and money is that spending it on one thing excludes spending it on another.

The Scarcity of Attention

Philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) has described attention in a famous quote from 1890:

In order to efficiently take in, process, and act on information, we need to focus on one thing at a time. This has been confirmed in recent cognitive research: Even if we may sometimes multitask and pay attention to several things at once, such as talking on the phone while cooking, it generally makes us slower and more prone to making mistakes. Quality wanes when we split our attention rather than focus on one single item or activity (Sternberg and Sternberg 2012) (Fig. 1.1).

Multitasking makes the quality of one's attention wane, as witnessed in our reflexes and the scores of information absorbed.

Time becomes a decisive factor when attention really only may be paid to one thing at a time. But time itself is fixed and limited: No matter how much we try to get organized and optimize with to-do lists, there are only 24 h in a day. We have a limited attention capacity (Kahneman 1973). This produces an upper bound for how much each of us may pay attention to, and therefore how much information we can take in and process on a daily basis. This makes the selection of information and allocation of attention of crucial importance.

Economics has been described as the "study of the allocation by individuals and societies of scarce resources" (Samuelson and Nordhaus 2010). When attention is viewed as a scarce resource, it creates the basis for studying the information age as an attention economy.

Information Sources

In order to obtain information about matters beyond our immediate environment, the media is needed as vehicles and presenters of information. This allots a very central role to the news media. Information is to a large extent received via channels created by the media. Therefore, the media's reliability as an information source is key to how well-informed, misinformed, or disinformed for that matter we are. If you do not pay attention to news or politics, but allocate your attention to entertainment, it should come as no surprise that you are hardly as informed about politics, as you would have been had you paid attention to it. And if attention is paid to unreliable sources and untrustworthy information, there is a greater risk of being deluded and duped. If attention is systematically spent on conspiratorial YouTube videos and political propaganda sites, no surprise either it invariably will color your perception of reality. A significant consumption of false claims, unconfirmed rumors "alternative facts," and fake news may cause you to lose your grip on the real world and relegate you to an alternative reality (Fig. 1.2).

One-sided news diets may result in distorted ideas of reality.

When attention is consumed by information, information is the source of knowledge, and attention is a scarce resource, it is important to spend attention with care. This is easier said than done. Many actors in the information market fight dirty to catch and harvest our attention.

The Market for Attention

Few people like being ignored, not seen nor heard by others. As individuals, we crave at least minimal dose of attention from other people and need it to thrive, both as children and adults. A lot of people just can't get enough, judging from the present-time celebrity and reality television culture. The pursuit of fame as reality star on TV or as a micro celebrity (or micro influencer) on social media may look like a pursuit of attention for the sake of attention itself (Marwick 2015) (Fig. 1.3).

Attention is pursued for its own sake, but may also be traded for sponsor and advertising revenue. Here is Kim Kardashian trying to "break the Internet," a metaphor for harvesting enormous amounts of online attention. (Spedding, E. (2016): "The man behind Kim Kardashian's Paper Magazine cover on how to break the Internet," The Telegraph, June 18, 2016, verified June 6, 2017: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/the-man-behind-kim-kardashians-paper-magazine-cover-on-how-to-br/).

Once in possession of people's attention, it may be transferred to others. If a stage performer points to one person in the audience, a large part of the audience's collective attention will be transferred from the performer to the happy fan. If you have people's attention, you can channel it to another person or product and monetize it. This is the principle in overt sponsorships and product placement alike. When the name of the firm goes on the player's T-shirt, or a media darling is paid to wear a brand visible to the cameras, the advertiser is purchasing into the audience's attention.

Marketing is intrinsically linked to attention harvesting. The aim of marketing is to influence behavior. Marketing is about persuading consumers into buying a certain product or voting for a specific candidate. No persuasion happens if no one is listening, reading of watching. Attention is the portal to people's minds and a necessary condition for all successful communication; from teaching and knowledge presentation to persuasion, seduction, and manipulation. This makes attention extremely valuable for everyone with something to sell. It is the main factor in all forms of marketing, branding, and advertising (Teixeira 2014).

Models of marketing qualify different levels of attention, ranging from no attention to partial attention (due to multitasking) to full attention (Fig. 1.4). The goal is to isolate the best marketing strategies given the attention already at the advertisers' disposal. If there is no attention, then attention needs to be seized; if there is only partial attention, it needs to be won over completely; and if someone's undivided attention is won over, it must be kept and used as efficiently as possible to persuade and affect behavior.

Strategies for catching or exploiting attention with a view to affecting behavior. ( Harvard Business Review (2015), verified June 10, 2017: https://hbr.org/2015/10/when-people-pay-attention-to-video-ads-and-why).

Attention Merchants

The intimate connection between attention, communication, and marketing forms the basis of an industry that Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu has labelled attention merchants (Wu 2016). The basic business model is quite simple: harvest attention and resell it for marketing and advertising purposes.

Benjamin Day was the inventor of this business model and one of the brains behind the Penny Press in the 1830s. Back then, newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal cost six cents; they were luxury items for the privileged few. In 1833, Benjamin Day launched The New York Sun at one cent a paper, dumping the price.

The news criteria were also dumped. The only criterion for the stories was how many papers they could sell. Sensational, dramatic, and juicy crime copy was also popular back then. Material was picked up on a daily basis from the police departments and the courts. Crime sold newspapers. Benjamin Day was no journalist; he was a businessman. His newspaper took tabloid to whole new levels in order to achieve readership-for example, running a successful series in 1835 reporting on a new "scientific" discovery of a race of bat people inhabiting the Moon. Flavor was added to the story with claims of the libertine and promiscuous lifestyle of the bat people. Fake news is not a new invention (Fig. 1.5).

When the sole criterion for success is to sell as many papers as possible, truth is of little or no consequence, and a lot of papers had to be sold to make the project fly. The papers were sold at less than the production costs. Selling a lot of papers in itself would have simply worsened the deficit. Indeed a bad business if the real customers were the readers paying a cent for the newspaper. In the attention merchant business model, however, the readers are actually the product sold to the real customers: the advertisers. The real customers for Benjamin Day were the companies who placed ads in The New York Sun to buy the attention of the readers.

The same business model is later being rehearsed on commercial TV competing for eyeballs. The viewers' attention is sold to the paying customers in the advertising industry. The industry in turn presents its messages and influences a broad public audience during commercial breaks. Ever more viewers, ever more attention is sold, and the higher the price for advertising seconds (Fig. 1.6).

Artist Richard Serra's minimalistic video work, "Television Delivers People," from 1973. (Richard Serra (1973): "TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE," verified May 4, 2017: http://www2.nau.edu/~d-ctel/mediaPlayer/artPlayer/courses/ART300/pov1_ch1/transcript.htm).

From a business perspective, TV programs are merely means for selling what it is really all about, advertisements. The purpose of the programs on commercial TV is to make you watch more TV and stay on the channel. Stay tuned.

In the wake of the digital revolution, (business) history repeats itself. As the saying goes on online social networks and platforms; if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. If you perceive services such as Google and Facebook as truly free of charge, you have misunderstood the business model and your own role in it. The main default business model online is the attention merchant. Media researcher Douglas Rushkoff points out:

The attention and data of the users are the items offered for sale to possibly third party. And similar to the casino, the more engagement by the users, the more social media stand to benefit. Like Robert de Niro says in Casino the movie: "In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing and keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more they lose. In the end, we get it all."

Data Collection

Corporations such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google collect enormous amounts of data about the online behavior of users. Together with masses of smaller players who also offer seemingly free products, not only do they sell user attention to advertising third parties; they sell a plethora of information about users. This goes for all the information shared when users fill out profiles, listing interests, age, gender, political affinity, relationship status, etc. Every piece of information given up has value when aggregated. This also applies to a heap of data constantly generated about our online behavior through cookies and other invisible tracking systems. Data about everything, from searches and search patterns, visited pages, and engagement on social media to e-mail contacts and consumption patterns, are collected. Unless your phone came out of the ark, the same goes for your physical movements. If a child has a Hello Barbie doll, it collects and sends information back to the producer Mattel about what the child talks about, likes, and wishes for. The collected data may be traded in a flourishing market where information on users and citizens is a valuable asset. Online surveillance and resale of the information generated by the surveillance is a growing industry. Already in 2012, the American data broker industry generated revenues ($156 billion) exceeding twice the amount the US government allocated to its whole intelligence budget.

With data collection, online media and businesses have taken things a step further than earlier attention merchants. Not only do they sell the audience's attention; the collected information is used to target ads for each individual user so that the ads hits home pertaining to user needs, interests, and stances. In Facebook's own words:

In less unequivocal terms, users are being monitored to the end of making economic profit by selling information about users along with their attention to third parties. Corporations like Facebook and Google secure their profit by means of a business model that is based on surveillance (Taplin 2017). Surveillance provides information about the surveilled that may be (mis)used to persuade, trick, and manipulate more effectively.

Hit Them Where It Hurts

The amount of collected data combined with powerful computers make it possible to predict quite personal things that users otherwise would not share publicly. Even if you do not state your gender and age and where you live, all the other data points collected from your phone, your computers, your credit cards, etc. are enough for this basic information to be computed with accuracy. And this knowledge is worth a lot in marketing terms. It is much easier to persuade someone to do something or influence their behavior if you know them and know which buttons to push.

The company Target decided to compute whether women were pregnant, even if they had not given that information. That would be useful for marketing during the pregnancy: "We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there's a good chance we could capture them for years ...As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they're going to start buying everything else too." Target succeeded in this profiling endeavor. About a year after the onset of this pregnancy-targeted marketing campaign, a father turned up in one of the stores, upset that his 17-year-old daughter had received a pregnancy-related advertising e-mail. When the store manager spoke to the father over the phone later, it was the father who apologized; his daughter was actually pregnant. It doesn't stop with pregnancy predictions. Big data's power of prediction may also establish your political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and other very private, personal, but very useful information.

These data may be used for other purposes than showing you "relevant" advertising, as Facebook so nicely puts it. The information may be abused in aggressive predatory advertising, where people stuck between a rock and a hard place are targeted right where they hurt the most. Cathy O'Neil, Ph.D. in Mathematics at Harvard University, activist, and author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), points out that if someone is in possession of people's zip codes, demographics, habits, interests, and consumer preferences, they may use this information to effectively target ads specifically to people under social and economic pressure. If you have trouble making ends meet, you get fast and furious offers of payday loans at extremely high interest rates. If you are stuck in a steady job with little chance of climbing the career ladder, you are offered courses at expensive universities. The idea behind predatory advertising is:

Vulnerable people are subjected to "false or overpriced promises" by leveraging their weak points. It is documented that data brokers have sold lists consisting of possible "targets" for predatory advertising of snake oil or worse that include rape survivors, addresses of Domestic Violence Shelters, senior citizens suffering from dementia, HIV/AIDS sufferers, people with diseases and prescriptions taken (including cancer and mental illness), and people with addictive behaviors and alcohol, gambling, and drug addictions.

Data-borne precision marketing is also exploited in political campaigns and ads. If you know the voters' profiles, it is much easier to persuade, seduce, or manipulate them and hence influence which candidate they vote for or if need be make them stay at home on election day. With the right data, you may be able to modify behavior and maybe even influence election results.

Money may buy you both the attention of voters and the information needed to influence their behavior in the desired direction. Barack Obama's campaign did it as early as 2008, when digital micromarketing became a big thing in American politics. Over a billion targeted e-mails were sent, particularly to young people and members of minorities in order to mobilize them to vote for the first time and vote for Obama. Targeted political micromarketing reached a new level and took a dark turn in the Brexit referendum in the UK and in the 2016 Presidential Election in the USA. Both Leave.EU and Trump's campaign hired the firm Cambridge Analytica, which marketed itself as "using data to change audience behavior" in both commercial and political advertising. When the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal broke recently, it came forth that Cambridge Analytica in 2014 started scraping personally identifiable information of up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent. The numbers are possibly even higher. With sufficient data about the electorate, it is possible better to manage it emotionally praying on pain points. This may be put to shady use as part of a "voter disengagement" tactic to demobilize the opponent's supposed supporters, so they do not vote at all. This tactic is reported to have been employed in the American presidential election to discourage African-Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton. Another tactic is to fuel anger and tensions, divisions, and conflict to the benefit of one's client. This method seems to have been employed in Kenya, where a lot of extremely divisive political messaging and targeted misinformation packages were observed during the 2017 election. Opening Pandora's box of political targeted micromarketing leveraging pain points may not only be damaging to the civility of democratic deliberation and participation. It may pose a danger to peace and stability. As Lucy Pardon, Privacy International Policy Officer, notes:

Many developing countries and emerging economies are at least as sensitive as the USA and UK to data misuse, misinformation, and fake news operations. At the same time, and at rapid pace, these new territories have caught the eye of the attention merchants and their entourage of big data analytics and demographic profiling to potentially hit the developing countries where it really hurts: on political self-determination.

There are dismal and even dystopian prospects in an attention and data economy where companies collect and appropriate personal information, commodify users into products, and employ the gathered information against the very users to efficiently manipulate and influence behavior (see Chap. 7).

There is a lot of money in politics. The bulk of the campaign gold is spent on buying attention and influence on radio, TV, and the Internet. However, precious attention may come for free. The attention politicians are able to secure through exposure and time allotted to speaking, making headlines and set the agenda on the mass media's news coverage come without charge.

Author information

Affiliations

Center for Information and Bubble Studies (CIBS), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen S, Denmark

Vincent F. Hendricks & Mads Vestergaard

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Hendricks, V.F., Vestergaard, M. (2019). The Attention Economy. In: Reality Lost. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00813-0_1

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According to legend, Abraham Lincoln was willing to walk several miles in order to borrow a book while growing up in Indiana during the early nineteenth century. "My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read," young Lincoln is...

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While you're here... help us stay here.

Are you enjoying open access to policy and research published by a broad range of organisations? Please donate today so that we can continue to provide this service.

As information providers and hubs for lifelong learning, libraries have always been resources for helping communities develop media literacy skills. Now, in the midst of a global pandemic, and in an age when we increasingly rely on digital media for information and communication, these critical thinking skills are more important than ever.

The American Library Association (ALA), working with talented thought leaders across the library and media literacy sectors, has created this guide to help library workers prepare for day-to-day interactions like the imagined reference desk one above. The guide offers resources and ideas to plan programs and activities to teach media literacy skills to adults and also to integrate these skills into programming you already offer at your library.

This guide has been created for out-of-school adult audiences, who library workers will generally meet in a public library context. However, many of the approaches and best practices explored are equally appropriate for a classroom or other library setting.

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Media literacy in the library: a guide for library practitioners

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While you're here... help us stay here. Are you enjoying open access to policy and research published by a broad range of organisations? Please donate today so that we can continue to provide this service. As information providers and hubs for lifelong learning, libraries have always been resources for helping communities develop media literacy skills.

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https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/

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Don’t believe what you see – digging deeper for the truth – Linking Learning

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How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding …

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Native advertising looks and feels like editorial but is either sponsored, custom or syndicated.

It has to be denoted by words such as:

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“Sponsored” or “Sponsored by [brand]”

“Sponsored Content”,

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“Suggested Post”

“Sponsored” tag,

“You might also like” or “You might like”,

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Native advertisements can also be recognised by icons:

‘Ad Choices’ icons

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Logos of the Native Advertiser Vendor

Visual Cues like shading,

Coloured backgrounds or borders

These are are all commonly used to distinguish paid vs. non-paid content, particularly across in-feed and promoted listing placements.

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https://www.admscentre.org.au/

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ARC Centre of Excellence | Automated Decision Making | ADM+S

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The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society aims to create knowledge and strategies for ethical automated decision-making.

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https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/11/02/ending-information-redlining/

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This past June, in my first address before ALA's membership as executive director, I outlined three urgencies facing the library and information science field: expanding digital and data access; rapidly diversifying the racial composition of the LIS workforce; and preserving library services by cultivating new stakeholders and partnerships.

In my most recent column, I called out equitable information access as a matter of social justice and questioned how ALA and its collective constituency might work even more intentionally to eradicate information poverty.

I want to pick up this discussion. Let's look at the pervasive and persistent inequities in information and digital access-and the degree to which they are profoundly raced and classed-as an instance of what I call information redlining.

Redlining is "the practice of arbitrarily denying or limiting financial services to specific neighborhoods, generally because its residents are people of color or are poor," according to Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Information redlining, as I am asserting it, is the systematic denial of equitable access to information, information services, and information retrieval methods.

Though this definition is my own, in researching other occurrences of the term, I discovered references to scholarship in the mid-1990s by researchers Marvin Anderson, Gary Bass, Patrice McDermott, and Henry Perritt, who forecast the increasing dependence on digital access and formats. Their writings argue that information redlining consists of, but is not limited to, not only how low-income, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), and rural communities access information, but what information is most readily available and discoverable by these groups.

In September, a study from Deutsche Bank called America's Racial Gap and Big Tech's Closing Window showed that 76% of the nation's Black residents and 62% of Latinx residents are slated to be shut out of or underprepared for 86% of US jobs by 2045. They are experiencing a "racial tech gap" that threatens their future economic mobility. The researchers observed that Black and Latinx households are a decade behind white households in broadband access. The study states: "If this digital racial gap is not addressed, in one generation alone, digitization could render the country's minorities into an unemployment abyss."

ALA and the nation's libraries have a primary role to play in closing this gap. In fact, I believe countering information redlining is at the center of the next wave of the civil rights movement that's already under way.

The Association's recent release " Built by E-Rate: A Case Study of Two Tribally-Owned Fiber Networks and the Role of Libraries in Making It Happen " illustrates how tribal libraries have used the federal E-Rate program to bring high-speed internet to sovereign nations in New Mexico. It's just one of many examples of how we can bring awareness to an area that urgently demands investment and advocacy.

The persistence of the coronavirus pandemic continues to expose the degree to which societal inequities are inextricably linked. Information disparities beget education and employment disparities; education and employment disparities beget economic, health, and housing disparities; economic, health, and housing disparities beget justice system and incarceration disparities; and justice system and incarceration disparities circle back to create information disparities.

The last link in this cycle-the relationship between justice system and incarceration inequities and information disparity-will be the focus of my next column. Until then.

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Ending Information Redlining | American Libraries Magazine

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Let's look at the pervasive and persistent inequities in information and digital access-and the degree to which they are profoundly raced and classed-as an instance of what I call information redlining-the systematic denial of equitable access to information, information services, and information retrieval methods.

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https://medialiteracy.org.au/index.php/framework

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Click to download the A3 Media Literacy Framework poster or here for the full PDF.
What is Media Literacy?
AMLA defines Media literacy as the ability to critically engage with media in all aspects of life.

Media literacy complements Digital Literacy and eSafety knowledge - and all three are required for
successful and safe participation in a digital world. Digital literacy focuses on the skills and knowledge
required to access and use digital technologies. eSafety focuses on issues like online hate and abuse, bullying, the protection of personal information and online scams.

Media Literacy encourages people to ask critical questions about the media using a set of six concepts. For any example of media (an advertisement, a news story, a film or television program, a YouTube video, video game or a social media post), we can ask the following questions:

Institutions: who made this media and why did they make it?

Audiences: who was this media made for and how are they likely to respond to it?

Representations: how are people, places or ideas portrayed in this media, and what are the impacts
of this?

Technologies: what technology was used to produce, access and circulate this media? Does the
technology gather personal data from users?

Languages: how does this media communicate using image, sounds and written text?

Relationships: what kind of relationships are being developed through the distribution and use of
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These questions will have very different answers, depending on the media example, but the process of asking and answering these questions leads to critical understandings, and forms the basis for more successful media experiences. These questions can be asked during the process of consuming, sharing or creating media. They can be integrated as part of any Digital Literacy and eSafety learning program.

Click to download the A3 Media Literacy Framework poster or here for the full PDF.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Click to download the A3 Media Literacy Framework poster or here for the full PDF. What is Media Literacy? AMLA defines Media literacy as the ability to critically engage with media in all aspects of life. Media literacy complements Digital Literacy and eSafety knowledge - and all three are required forsuccessful and safe participation in a digital world.

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https://get.checkology.org/
https://get.checkology.org/lesson/branded-content/
Excellent overview of branded content and gets you to think about what is acceptable/ethical. Great skepticism training.

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Checkology is a free e-learning platform with engaging, authoritative lessons on subjects like news media bias, misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and more. Learners develop the ability to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.

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https://bigthink.com/high-culture/tim-wu-on-the-attention-merchants-2/

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"My Experience is What I Agree to Pay Attention to," said psychologist William James. And therein lies the problem and danger of advertising: we don't always agree or choose to pay attention, but it shapes our life experience irrevocably.

When we turn on the television, or leaf through the newspaper, every one of us enters into a knowing contract with advertisers - they will do their best to sell us something. According to Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University and author of new book The Attention Merchants, the online world is markedly different - it runs away with that mutual understanding, stretches it to places and methods you would not sensibly consent to.

What makes us stick around, then? Wu believes it's our love of free things. Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay and many other platforms that have become the center of our social, business and retail lives don't cost a thing to use, and allow us to do so much. But what are the costs of everything being free? In exchange for these privileges, companies and media organizations harvest our attention and sell it to advertisers. They are 'the attention merchants'. That makes you the commodity.

Many of us revolt against ads - we use ad blockers, choose streaming over broadcast TV, listen to on-demand music rather than radio, and hack our way out of much-loathed YouTube commercial overtures. But there is subtle attention harvesting happening in ways we cannot see, and do not question. Our preferences and habits are being mined and that information used to sell products and ideas to us at an even deeper level. The high-competition for our attention results in ever-increasing misleading click-bait, flashing images, shorter content (anything to get us in and keep us there), and it actually changes us neurologically. We've lost our ability to deeply focus, to get into a flow state where profound work is made - that, in Wu's eyes is a definite and serious cost.

But even more worrying is the way advertisements push and pull you toward decisions that could change the course of your life entirely. You may spend more money than planned and miss out on experiences you would have organically desired instead, like travel. You may vote for someone you previously wouldn't have. Open to the influence of companies who know a lot about you, you may end up living a little differently that you wanted to - without even realizing it. This gets us to one of Wu's big questions: since your mind and attention have become commodities, open to extensive and subtle influenced, are the decisions you're making really yours? How much of your life is motivated by ideas and impulses disguised so that you feel they are authentically yours? Wu says we need to be diligent in removing ourselves from the attention marketplace regularly enough so that we can be sure we are living lives we can truly call our own.

Tim Wu's most recent book is The Attention Merchants The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.

Tim Wu: So there was a man named Benjamin Day who I call the first of the attention merchants, the founder of the New York Sun, who was in his own way a business genius and an innovator. He had this idea which was as opposed to selling a newspaper for six cents which was the normal way of doing it, he would sell his newspaper for a penny and try and attract an enormous audience and resell that audience to advertisers. So the newspapers at the time, the six penny papers, they're a little bit boring. They covered politics and finance. They didn't have crime stories, that kind of thing. And he introduced a sort of a far more interesting newspaper. The very first issue was all about the suicide of a man who had been separated from his lover. It had stories of death, mayhem, destruction, gossip and was sold at such a low price that he managed to attract these enormous audiences which then were resold to advertisers. Now the thing about that penny price is it was a money losing proposition unless you sold enough and unless you reach enough advertisers to make it worth it. So he pioneered this unusual business model which today is found in as many places as Google, Facebook, Instagram, you know, it's sort of taken over our lives.

So we are in a period where there's something of a revolt going on against advertising. There are a lot of people who consider themselves immune to ads or try and avoid all advertising. There's cord cutters and there's a lot of people who use ad blocking technologies to try and have themselves sort of in an ad free zone. And it's reached the point where it's a little bit of a kind of a war, maybe a war of attrition. And I'll say two things about that. First in the history of advertising there have been similar moments. It seems that about every 30 years or so there's a kind of revolt. Usually because things have gone too far in one way or another and I think in some ways things have gone too far in the web. That there is just too much, too intrusive, too much privacy invasion and people are starting to say, you know, this is not what I bargained for. Whatever deal we had I think you're exceeding the terms.

I think that hopefully it will lead to a place where we strike some kind of new deal, some kind of understanding is made. You know the web lacks any kind of limits as to where advertising should or shouldn't go. It's not like newspapers or something where there's, you know, you don't have every page of the newspaper completely covered in ads. There's kind of a bargain. And I hope we reach that on the web.
[Another thing that it will probably lead to however is also more and more efforts to use advertising that is surreptitious, that gets under the radar, that you don't really realize is advertising. You might even call it manipulation or nudges.

I think you'll see this particularly with some of our devices or new technologies. Let's say you use Google Maps trying to find something, a place to eat. How much of that decision is based on what's nearby and the best, how much it is based on who is paid at Google to sort of put the ad there. I think as we move into an era where we increasingly rely on intelligent intermediaries defining things for us or to be our guides in life the possibilities of surreptitious marketing increase. And I think that's a direction that we'll probably see, particularly with so much resistance to advertising.

You know I think as a culture we've become obsessed with free stuff almost frankly quite to our detriment. You know it's almost impossible for many people to consider using anything on the web that isn't free. Somehow it's like an outrage if you have to pay for it. And there's been a cost to that. I think that when many people signed up for Facebook in the early days it just seemed fun and free. There was very few advertising or very little advertising. But slowly we've come to understand that you're paying in very different ways. You're paying with your data which you hand over. You're paying with your attention. If you spend I don't know how many minutes or even hours a day on Facebook you're giving over something of tremendous value. And ultimately there's several ways in which we're paying. First of all we are granting unprecedented levels of access to ourselves, to our portal of judgment which ultimately has commercial influence or can influence our life in other ways. So we may without realizing it end up living lives that are a little different than we might have wanted to buying more things than we expected to, voting for people we might not have thought we would. All these sorts of things. We make ourselves open to influence, let's just put it that way.

And the other cost is that ad supported mediums have a constant need to deliver a receptive audience. And since we are the audience we are increasingly programmed to be more receptive which means open to distraction, ready to see something, constantly clicking and looking. There's an effect that I call the casino effect which I think comes to describe our lives on the web where you sit down to write an email and then suddenly you notice four hours have gone by. You're not quite sure what happened. You do know you clicked on a bunch of stuff and you went here and you went there. I think that is kind of becoming our lives and that's a very attractive mental state for advertisers because you're constantly clicking, constantly refreshing, constantly seeing new stuff. Whether it's good for us is an entirely different question. And so I think we're at risk of losing some of our ability to deeply focus, to get work done, to have the kind of attention span you need to do more profound kinds of work. And that I think is some of the cost of free.

So one of the inspirations for this book was the philosopher William James who is one of the first psychologists writing in the nineteenth century. And he had this one line that really struck me where he said roughly, you know, your life experience is what you choose to direct your attention to. And so at the end of your day is when it's all said and done what your life was will be the culmination of what you paid attention to. You know and that's in some very profound way true. And it does suggest something interesting about our times. We live in a time where our life experience moment to moment is more intermediated than any other time in human history. It's almost like we live in a built environment of attention. Most, I don't know exactly how you count the hours but many of our hours are screen as opposed to physical. I mean the screen is physical but it's some virtual thing. And in some sense we live in a cocoon almost, a projection at this point. You know we're still here but in terms of what our attention is paid to a lot of it is not here. And so I think that whether that's good or bad I'll leave to one side but it certainly makes it important that we understand the motives of those who are creating the cocoon that you're living in.

If we are living in kind of a simulated reality that's where we are, virtual reality is just the stronger version of it. You better pretty profoundly trust who's creating your reality for you and maybe have some say in what that reality looks like. And I worry and part of the reason I wrote this book is to examine those motivations. And if it is fundamentally the motivation to gather you up for resale to something well that might not actually be in your interest or sort of suddenly manipulate you in different ways. But even more profoundly than being sold to which is kind of annoying there is this issue of living your own life, making decisions which are yours. And I don't care if you listen to the founders or John Stuart Mill or if you're a religious person but the importance of decisions that are truly ours is so fundamental, so profound to a realized life that I think we need in this day and age there's so much that we're exposed to is motivated by other ideas. We need to be very careful about reserving time and space for ourselves and making decisions which we can truly call our own in order to live a life you can truly call your own.

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, professor at Columbia Law School, and director of the Poliak Center for the Study of First Amendment Issues at Columbia Journalism School. Wu's[...]

"My Experience is What I Agree to Pay Attention to," said psychologist William James. And therein lies the problem and danger of advertising: we don't always agree or choose to pay attention, but it shapes our life experience irrevocably.

"What you pay attention to, is your life." Where do you place precious brain resources?

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Is Your Life Really Yours? How 'The Attention Merchants' Got Inside Our Heads

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"My Experience is What I Agree to Pay Attention to," said psychologist William James. And therein lies the problem and danger of advertising: we don't always agree or choose to pay attention, but it shapes our life experience irrevocably.

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https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/05/09/how-misinformation-spreads-on-social-media-and-what-to-do-about-it/

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How misinformation spreads on social media-And what to do about it | Brookings

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As widespread as the problem is, opportunities to glimpse misinformation in action are fairly rare. Most users who generate misinformation do not also share accurate information as well, which makes it difficult to tease out the effect of misinformation itself.

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https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html

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A well-functioning democracy requires free and diverse news media capable of keeping people informed, holding powerful actors to account and enabling public discussion of public...

European Convention on Human Rights - Article 10 - Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions...

Format : PDF Epub Ref MediaRegul_GBR

The aim of this publication is to contribute to a wider understanding of the concept of hate speech, to offer a starting point in terms of providing recommendations and mechanisms for...

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Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making

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Contemporary social technology means that we are witnessing something new: information pollution at a global scale. How do we begin to address information pollution? This report provides a new framework for policy-makers, legislators, researchers, technologists and practitioners working on the theoretical and practical challenges related to mis-, dis- and mal-information - the three elements of information disorder.

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https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/these-6-tips-will-help-you-spot-misinformation-online/

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I'll never forget the moment the mob breached the walls of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

As a senior multimedia reporter with MediaWise, I was tracking misinformation about the insurrection as it unfolded. The year began with an existential threat to our democracy. And we wrap 2021 with a new COVID-19 variant.

Now, more than ever, we need digital media literacy education in the U.S. - to help teens understand the importance of sorting fact from fiction online; teach older Americans how to spot the fake images, memes and doctored videos that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection and prolonged the coronavirus pandemic; and support Spanish-speakers, who are disproportionately targeted with misinformation.

MediaWise has done all that in 2021, in addition to expanding our Campus Correspondents program, which centers on college students teaching other college students how to spot misinformation online. And we end the year with plans to take our digital media literacy training global with courses available through WhatsApp in Brazil, Spain and Turkey.

But, right now you might be thinking: "Hey, this sounds great, but here I am on Poynter.org, arguably the greatest journalism website in history - why can't you just tell me right now how to avoid misinformation?"

You're in luck. Here are six tools and techniques you, your friends (or enemies) and family can use to make a dent in the false information flowing on the internet today.

The fake news debunker by InVID & WeVerify is one of the most powerful tools for spotting misinformation online. After installing this Google Chrome plug-in, you can right-click any image you come across on Facebook, Twitter or any other website, scroll down to "Image Reverse Search - Google" and find the original source.

This is helpful because you can see whether the meme you're investigating is using an image out of context - maybe from the wrong time and place - to deceive you. Since reverse image searches also reveal very similar images, you may be able to find out whether a photo has been Photoshopped.
PRO-TIP: Scroll down to "Image Reverse Search - ALL" to locate an image using search engines from other countries. This casts a wider net for your image-based fact check. PRO-PRO-TIP: It works for videos! If you click Keyframes under the video tab, then drop in a YouTube link, InVid will pull still images and perform reverse image searches on them to locate the original source.
Seriously. Stop reading. Open a new tab and Google "Who is Alex Mahadevan and does he know what he's talking about?" Then (thanks for coming back) open another tab and Google "Is MediaWise legit?"

This technique (again, thanks for coming back) is called lateral reading. The Stanford History Education Group, which partnered with Poynter at the launch of MediaWise in 2018, determined that fact-checkers use this technique to navigate the internet - and are better than academics at separating fact from fiction.

The key is to stop digesting the post, image, video or article and immediately start investigating the person or organization who shared it, data or research cited in it or the source of the photograph. SHEG, in 2016 research, found that many people take an article or website as fact, especially if it has slick graphics or official-looking logos.

To get the most out of lateral reading, learn to craft advanced Google search queries. You can drill down on the exact information you see by using a few phrases or special characters.

"Alex Mahadevan" - the quotes quill give you an exact phrase

"Alex Mahadevan" -mediawise - the minus sign will exclude any results that have to do with MediaWise

"Alex Mahadevan" arrest report filetype:pdf - this may bring up a pdf document of an arrest report for the author

"Alex Mahadevan" AROUND(20) "nerd" - this returns any results in which the author's name and the word nerd appear within 20 words (roughly a sentence) of each other. As you can see, this word has never once appeared within the same sentence as this author's name

"Alex Mahadevan" site:poynter.org - this query returns any web page on the Poynter website that mentions the author's name

Remember SHEG from earlier? As part of that original MediaWise partnership, they developed three questions to ask when you want to fact-check something on your social media feed:

1. Who's behind the information?

2. What's the evidence?

3. What are other sources saying?

I would argue that the first question is the most powerful, as you can usually discount a post when you find out the user who posted it has a major bias or history of spreading disinformation. And one of the most powerful tools for checking out who's behind the information: The Wayback Machine.

This Internet Archive, which has saved billions of web pages spanning decades, allows you to go back in time and see if the source you're reading has a devious history, or lacks the expertise in what they are saying. This has been especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we have seen chiropractors and other fringe health workers spreading anti-vaccine disinformation.

I recently saw some eyebrow-raising Instagram posts that led me to the website of a Dr. Jack Kruse. Using Wayback Machine, I was able to discover that as far back as 2012, the author (who refers to his writing as "thought secretions") had been endorsing health misinformation - such as cell phones being responsible for so-called "geopathic stress."

The digital ad industry was worth $356 billion in 2020, with social media platforms making up more than $40 million, according to a report from the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder.

Driving all that dough? Algorithms and your eyeballs - as well as those of your aunt Maude, who may be spreading misinformation thanks to the mathematical equations driving the attention economy.

If you, your friends and your family understand that a huge factor determining what you see online are algorithms, and that algorithms function based on clicks, comments and shares, and that that engagement is fueled by rage, anxiety and fear - you're a step closer to being a more critical consumer of online information. Check your feelings the next time you see something posted on Facebook, it might stop you from sharing misinformation.

WeVerify works great for verifying images and videos that have been online for a while. But, if you see a post during a breaking news situation - like this tweet claiming to show a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport - you might come up short with a reverse image search (no original photos!)

Is that tweet even showing the airport in Kabul? A look at Google Earth, which displays 3D views of most parts of the planet, confirms that we are likely looking at Hamid Karzai International Airport.

Notice the shadows? Using SunCalc, you can determine whether the image was captured at the hour the post claims. Just plug in the location and time to find out the exact position of the sun at the time of the claim.

And a quick glance at Weather Underground's Historical Weather archive can confirm, or debunk, an image based on what the weather looks like.

Answering the last SHEG question - what are other sources saying - is a time-saver. And the Google Fact-Check Explorer makes it even easier to debunk misinformation online.

This database of fact-checks posted by reputable fact-checkers likely has the answer you're looking for, which lets you bypass all that hard verification work. But, what's the fun in that?

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These 6 tips will help you spot misinformation online - Poynter

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MediaWise, Poynter's digital media literacy program, has expanded to in the U.S. and abroad. But anyone can learn to spot misinformation right now.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwVYaY39YbQ

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How fake news does real harm | Stephanie Busari

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https://theconversation.com/there-is-in-fact-a-wrong-way-to-use-google-here-are-5-tips-to-set-you-on-the-right-path-179099

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I was recently reading comments on a post related to COVID-19, and saw a reply I would classify as misinformation, bordering on conspiracy. I couldn't help but ask the commenter for evidence.

Their response came with some web links and "do your own research". I then asked about their research methodology, which turned out to be searching for specific terms on Google.

As an academic, I was intrigued. Academic research aims to establish the truth of a phenomenon based on evidence, analysis and peer review.

On the other hand, a search on Google provides links with content written by known or unknown authors, who may or may not have knowledge in that area, based on a ranking system that either follows the preferences of the user, or the collective popularity of certain sites.

In other words, Google's algorithms can penalise the truth for not being popular.

Google Search's ranking system has a fraction of a second to sort through hundreds of billions of web pages, and index them to find the most relevant and (ideally) useful information.

Somewhere along the way, mistakes get made. And it'll be a while before these algorithms become foolproof - if ever. Until then, what can you do to make sure you're not getting the short end of the stick?

One question, millions of answers

There are around 201 known factors on which a website is analysed and ranked by Google's algorithms. Some of the main ones are:

the specific key words used in the search

the meaning of the key words

the relevance of the web page, as assessed by the ranking algorithm

the "quality" of the contents

the usability of the web page

and user-specific factors such as their location and profiling data taken from connected Google products, including Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps.

Research has shown users pay more attention to higher-ranked results on the first page. And there are known ways to ensure a website makes it to the first page.

One of these is " search engine optimisation ", which can help a web page float into the top results even if its content isn't necessarily quality.

The other issue is Google Search results are different for different people, sometimes even if they have the exact same search query.

Results are tailored to the user conducting the search. In his book The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser points out the dangers of this - especially when the topic is of a controversial nature.

Personalised search results create alternate versions of the flow of information. Users receive more of what they've already engaged with (which is likely also what they already believe).

This leads to a dangerous cycle which can further polarise people's views, and in which more searching doesn't necessarily mean getting closer to the truth.

A work in progress

While Google Search is a brilliant search engine, it's also a work in progress. Google is continuously addressing various issues related to its performance.

One major challenge relates to societal biases concerning race and gender. For example, searching Google Images for "truck driver" or "president" returns images of mostly men, whereas "model" and "teacher" returns images of mostly women.

While the results may represent what has historically been true (such as in the case of male presidents), this isn't always the same as what is currently true - let alone representative of the world we wish to live in.

Some years ago, Google reportedly had to block its image recognition algorithms from identifying "gorillas", after they began classifying images of black people with the term.

Another issue highlighted by health practitioners relates to people self diagnosing based on symptoms. It's estimated about 40% of Australians search online for self diagnoses, and there are about 70,000 health-related searches conducted on Google each minute.

There can be serious repercussions for those who incorrectly interpret information found through " Dr Google " - not to mention what this means in the midst of a pandemic.

Google has delivered a plethora of COVID misinformation related to unregistered medicines, fake cures, mask effectiveness, contact tracing, lockdowns and, of course, vaccines.

According to one study, an estimated 6,000 hospitalisations and 800 deaths during the first few months of the pandemic were attributable to misinformation (specifically the false claim that drinking methanol can cure COVID).

To combat this, Google eventually prioritised authoritative sources in its search results. But there's only so much Google can do.

We each have a responsibility to make sure we're thinking critically about the information we come across. What can you do to make sure you're asking Google the best question for the answer you need?

Read more: Is Google getting worse? Increased advertising and algorithm changes may make it harder to find what you're looking for

How to Google smarter

In summary, a Google Search user must be aware of the following facts:

1. Google Search will bring you the top-ranked web pages which are also the most relevant to your search terms. Your results will be as good as your terms, so always consider context and how the inclusion of certain terms might affect the result.

2. You're better off starting with a simple search, and adding more descriptive terms later. For instance, which of the following do you think is a more effective question: " will hydroxychloroquine help cure my COVID?" or " what is hydroxychloroquine used for? "

3. Quality content comes from verified (or verifiable) sources. While scouring through results, look at the individual URLs and think about whether that source holds much authority (for instance, is it a government website?). Continue this process once you're in the page, too, always checking for author credentials and information sources.

4. Google may personalise your results based on your previous search history, current location and interests (gleaned through other products such as Gmail, YouTube or Maps). You can use incognito mode to prevent these factors from impacting your search results.

5. Google Search isn't the only option. And you don't just have to leave your reading to the discretion of its algorithms. There are several other search engines available, including Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Sometimes it's good to triangulate your results from outside the filter bubble.

Read more: Australia's competition watchdog says Google has a monopoly on online advertising - but how does it work?

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There is, in fact, a 'wrong' way to use Google. Here are 5 tips to set you on the right path

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I was recently reading comments on a post related to COVID-19, and saw a reply I would classify as misinformation, bordering on conspiracy. I couldn't help but ask the commenter for evidence. Their response came with some web links and "do your own research".

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https://cor.stanford.edu/curriculum/lessons/intro-to-lateral-reading/

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This lesson introduces students to lateral reading, a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the webpage and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source. Students watch the teacher model lateral reading and then have a chance to practice the strategy to determine who is behind a website and, ultimately, whether that website is trustworthy.

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Intro to Lateral Reading | Civic Online Reasoning

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This lesson introduces students to lateral reading, a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the page and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoQG6Tin-1E&t=469s

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Check Yourself with Lateral Reading: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #3

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/obama-jordan-peele-deepfake-video-debunk-buzzfeed

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You're looking at the future of fake news and propaganda.

Don't be embarrassed if you were fooled, even if only briefly. Technology to trick our eyes and ears is advancing rapidly. Teams in Germany are working on Face2Face, the type of face- and voice-swapping technology used to create the video above. Software giant Adobe is creating a "Photoshop for audio" that makes it easy to edit and manipulate what someone has said, as is a Montreal startup called Lyrebird. After you've selectively edited someone's words, you could take that audio and use tech developed at the University of Washington to generate a video of the very same person speaking those words, just to make it fully convincing.

The ObamaPeele video was created using another emerging technology: FakeApp. It's a free tool that's recently been used to insert the faces of celebrities into porn videos. Other people have put Nic Cage into Indiana Jones, face-swapped Nic Cage and Lois Lane, and created other cinematic crimes against humanity.

Part of the process for creating this video involved taking an original video of Barack Obama and pasting Jordan Peele 's mouth into it. It looked really bad and clumsy at first. But things got remarkably better the longer FakeApp was left to process a more believable amalgamation of Obama's head and Peele's mouth. That took roughly 56 hours and was overseen by a video effects professional.

So the good news is it still requires a decent amount of skill, processing power, and time to create a really good "deepfake."

The bad news is that the lesson of computers and technology is this stuff will get easier, cheaper, and more ubiquitous faster than you would expect - or be ready for. Even at this early stage it's proving difficult for humans to consistently separate deepfakes from real videos, according to Matthias Niessner, who runs the Visual Computing Lab at Technical University Munich and leads the research on Face2Face.

"Essentially, we have a user study where we asked people try to spot the difference - turns out we humans are not so great at it," he told BuzzFeed News.

This is why experts in computer science have been warning that an age of ubiquitous deepfakes could help usher in an "infocalypse."

Niessner, however, is hopeful that groups like his are making progress training artificial intelligence to detect a fake.

"On the positive side, we managed to train several neural networks that are indeed pretty good at figuring out forged images/videos. ... Ideally, we're imagining automated methods in a browser or social media platform to tell what's fake and what's real," he said.

But right now the technology to create effective fakes is widely available, thanks to FakeApp. The tech to spot them is not. This is where you come in.

There are basic tips you can follow to ensure you don't get fooled easily. If more people are equipped to spot a fake, then the world has a better shot at avoiding a dystopian hellscape where every movie stars Nic Cage, and governments, trolls, and companies manufacture perfect fakes that collectively make us lose touch with reality.

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How To Spot A DeepFake Like The Barack Obama-Jordan Peele Video

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This "deepfake" video starring Jordan Peele as Barack Obama shows how easy it's getting to create convincing audio and video fakes. Here's how to fight back.

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https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias

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Journalism is tied to a set of ethical standards and values, including truth and accuracy, fairness and impartiality, and accountability. However, journalism today often strays from objective fact, resulting in biased news and endless examples of media bias.

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Adobe PDF Content Authenticity Initiative

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https://contentauthenticity.org/

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Creating the standard for digital content provenance.

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Media Manipulation Casebook - examples, how to detect and debunk

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https://mediamanipulation.org/

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The Technology and Social Change Project was active from 2019-2023. The Media Manipulation Casebook was a major publication of the TaSC project, and will remain fully accessible at this URL going forward, but will no longer be actively updated.

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A digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation cam

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https://tineye.com/

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TinEye is an image search and recognition company. We are experts in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, and machine learning.

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https://toolbox.google.com/factcheck/explorer

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https://localnews.piji.com.au/2022-02-01

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Local news is a vital service for communities, telling the stories of the people in the places where they live. Research has shown it has a positive impact on individuals’ sense of wellbeing, their participation in community life and the quality of local governance. The news business is in transition though, and while news coverage is strong in some places, there are gaps emerging in others, and particularly in rural and regional areas.

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Digital Technologies and Selective Exposure: How Choice and Filter Bubbles Shape News Media Exposure

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Digital Technologies and Selective Exposure: How Choice and Filter Bubbles Shape News Media Exposure

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1940161219862988

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https://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/nmrc

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The News and Media Research Centre (N&MRC) advances public understanding of our changing media environment. The N&MRC is Australia's only specialist Research Centre dedicated to exploring news consumption, social and digital media networks, and the legal, ethical and social impacts of communication technologies.

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https://iabaustralia.com.au/resource/nickable-slidesmarch-2022/

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This pack of industry slides, with the latest data on digital consumption, ad revenue and ad effectiveness research, is made specifically for pilfering and perfect for sales and pitch decks, team updates and marketing students.

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This pack of industry slides, with the latest data on digital consumption, ad revenue and ad effectiveness research, is made [...]

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https://apo.org.au/node/312650

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APO is closing

APO is closing operations at Swinburne University on 15 December 2023. Review our FAQ to find out what this means for you.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for credible and fast news. In the early days, news consumption increased as the public tried to make sense of the rapidly evolving crisis. Despite the surge in demand, news organisations experienced a substantial hit to revenues, which led to the closure or suspension of many local newspapers across Australia. The pandemic has accelerated the industry's decades-long struggle to replace falling advertising income.

The global data show there is no consistent pattern in COVID-19's impact on news consumers. In Australia, 57% say their lives have been impacted by the pandemic, the lowest out of the 46 countries surveyed.

However, this year's report reveals the rapid increase in news consumption by Australians at the start of the pandemic has not been maintained. The proportion of people paying for it has not increased, and interest in news has declined since 2020.

The report also finds that Australians have become more trusting of news in general but concern about misinformation remains high. However, many Australians lack adequate levels of media literacy to identify it and are unaware of the financial difficulty facing the news industry.
Key findings:

Trust in news increased globally over the past 12 months. In Australia, trust in news has risen (+5) to 43%, close to the global average (44%).

Australians' interest in news dropped during the pandemic in line with other countries. Interest in the news has been consistently declining among Australian audiences.

General concern about false and misleading information online in Australia is high (64%), and much higher than the global average (56%).

Women, younger generations and those with low income are less likely to see themselves or their views as being fairly or sufficiently reflected in the news.

The majority of Australians (66%) are either unaware that commercial news organisations are less profitable than they were 10 years ago, or they don't know about the current financial state of the news media.

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This report finds that the rapid increase in news consumption by Australians at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been maintained. The proportion of people paying for news has not increased, and interest in news has declined since 2020.

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https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/03/11/split-screen?feed=biden_trump

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Facebook's recommendation algorithm shows different news, groups, and hashtags to different users. But who sees what? Split Screen attempts to answer that question with real world data collected between December 2020 and June 2022 from paid panelists as part of The Markup's Citizen Browser project.

The dial compares how often the content was shown to one grouping over the other. You can tap on hover over a dial to view our analysis and a breakdown of the numbers.

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Split Screen: How Different Are Americans' Facebook Feeds? - The Markup

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Snapshots from the Facebook feeds of our Citizen Browser panelists illuminate how Facebook's recommendation algorithm siloes information on the platform.

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N&MRC Media Literacy Education Evaluation Framework

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N&MRC Media Literacy Education Evaluation Framework

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https://uclearn.canberra.edu.au/courses/12135/files/3284186

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https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/digital-media-literacy/how-filter-bubbles-isolate-you/1/

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The page you are looking for could not be found.

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https://vimeo.com/51181384

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We detected a high number of errors from your connection. To continue, please confirm that youâ€™re a human (and not a spambot).

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There are no "regular results" on Google anymore.

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https://theconversation.com/the-problem-of-living-inside-echo-chambers-110486

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Pick any of the big topics of the day - Brexit, climate change or Trump's immigration policies - and wander online.

What one is likely to find is radical polarization - different groups of people living in different worlds, populated with utterly different facts.

Many people want to blame the "social media bubble" - a belief that everybody sorts themselves into like-minded communities and hears only like-minded views.

From my perspective as a philosopher who thinks about communities and trust, this fails to get at the heart of the issue.

In my mind, the crucial issue right now isn't what people hear, but whom people believe.

Bubble or cult?

My research focuses on "epistemic bubbles" and "echo chambers." These are two distinct ideas, that people often blur together.

An epistemic bubble is what happens when insiders aren't exposed to people from the opposite side.

An echo chamber is what happens when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside.

An epistemic bubble, for example, might form on one's social media feed. When a person gets all their news and political arguments from Facebook and all their Facebook friends share their political views, they're in an epistemic bubble. They hear arguments and evidence only from their side of the political spectrum. They're never exposed to the other side's views.

An echo chamber leads its members to distrust everybody on the outside of that chamber. And that means that an insider's trust for other insiders can grow unchecked.

Two communications scholars, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella, offered a careful analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber in their 2008 book, "The Echo Chamber."

Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News team, they said, systematically manipulated whom their followers trusted. Limbaugh presented the world as a simple binary - as a struggle only between good and evil. People were trustworthy if they were on Limbaugh's side. Anybody on the outside was malicious and untrustworthy.

In that way, an echo chamber is a lot like a cult.

Echo chambers isolate their members, not by cutting off their lines of communication to the world, but by changing whom they trust. And echo chambers aren't just on the right. I've seen echo chambers on the left, but also on parenting forums, nutritional forums and even around exercise methods.

In an epistemic bubble, outside voices aren't heard. In an echo chamber, outside voices are discredited.

Is it all just a bubble?

Many experts believe that the problem of today's polarization can be explained through epistemic bubbles.

According to legal scholar and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, the main cause of polarization is that internet technologies have made the world such that people don't really run into the other side anymore.

Many people get their news from social media feeds. Their feeds get filled up with people like them - who usually share their political views. Eli Pariser, online activist and chief executive of Upworthy, spotlights how the invisible algorithms behind people's internet experience limit what they see.

For example, says Pariser, Google keeps track of its user's choices and preferences, and changes its search results to suit them. It tries to give individuals what they want - so liberal users, for example, tend to get search results that point them toward liberal news sites.

If the problem is bubbles, then the solution would be exposure. For Sunstein, the solution is to build more public forums, where people will run into the other side more often.

The real problem is trust

In my view, however, echo chambers are the real problem.

New research suggests there probably aren't any real epistemic bubbles. As a matter of fact, most people are regularly exposed to the other side.

Moreover, bubbles should be easy to pop: Just expose insiders to the arguments they've missed.

But this doesn't actually seem to work, in so many real-world cases. Take, for example, climate change deniers. They are fully aware of all the arguments on the other side. Often, they rattle off all the standard arguments for climate change, before dismissing them. Many of the standard climate change denial arguments involve claims that scientific institutions and mainstream media have been corrupted by malicious forces.

What's going on, in my view, isn't just a bubble. It's not that people's social media feeds are arranged so they don't run across any scientific arguments; it's that they've come to systematically distrust the institutions of science.

This is an echo chamber. Echo chambers are far more entrenched and far more resistant to outside voices than epistemic bubbles. Echo chamber members have been prepared to face contrary evidence. Their echo-chambered worldview has been arranged to dismiss that evidence at its source.

They're not totally irrational, either. In the era of scientific specialization, people must trust doctors, statisticians, biologists, chemists, physicists, nuclear engineers and aeronautical engineers, just to go about their day. And they can't always check with perfect accuracy whether they have put their trust in the right place.

An echo chamber member, however, distrusts the standard sources. Their trust has been redirected and concentrated inside the echo chamber.

To break somebody out of an echo chamber, you'd need to repair that broken trust. And that is a much harder task than simply bursting a bubble.

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The problem of living inside echo chambers

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Rush Limbaugh is said to have presented the world as a simple binary - as a struggle only between good and evil. That worked, as a philosopher explains, because many people live in echo chambers.

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https://www.politicalcompass.org/test

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If you have been directed here directly from another site, we ask that you read our homepage before continuing

Before taking the test: Please note that this isn't a survey, and these aren't questions. They're propositions. To question the logic of individual ones that irritate you is to miss the point. Some propositions are extreme, and some are moderate. That's how we can show you whether you lean towards extremism or moderation on the Compass. Your responses should not be overthought. Some of them are intentionally vague. Their purpose is to trigger reactions in the mind, measuring feelings and prejudices rather than detailed opinions on policy.

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Just a few propositions to start with, concerning - no less - how you see the country and the world.

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self-test of your position on 2 political dimensions

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https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/rate-your-bias

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Use this tool to rate your political bias.

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https://www.newsguardtech.com/reports/
Online misinformation and impacts on society

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https://westernsydney.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/1824641/media_literacy_infographic.pdf

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By Neil Selwyn, professor at the faculty of education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Children and young people have long been expected to develop digital skills and knowledge relevant to the technologies of their time. During the 1980s this took the form of 'computer literacy' and 'computer skills' such as learning basic programming commands and how to format floppy disks. In the 1990s, attention turned to 'internet literacy' and 'web skills' such as navigating hypertext and building web-pages. The 2000s and 2010s then saw the rise of 'cyber safety' and '21st century skills' such as online communication, creativity and collaboration. Most recently, we have seen calls for 'media & information literacy' skills relating to dealing with viral content, mis-information and fake news.

While the terminology might change, all these different 'digital literacies' are driven by a common aim of supporting children and young people to become informed, imaginative and savvy users of technology. As such, the DigiGen project is understandably interested in exploring what forms of digital literacy might be relevant to new generations of Europeans, and how digital literacy programmes can be developed for schools, families and other settings.

RETHINKING DIGITAL LITERACY FOR AN AGE OF ALGORITHMS AND AUTOMATION

We are now beginning to see arguments that digital technology is entering a new phase that requires us to start thinking about 'digital literacy' in markedly different terms. Whereas digital literacy efforts to date have focused on supporting young people to become better users of technology, the most significant digital technologies during the 2020s are likely not to be technology 'used by' people per se. Instead, the most influential and insidious digital technologies over the next few years are likely to be technologies that are 'used on' people.

We are talking here about the rise of data-driven automated technologies - what is often referred to as 'automated decision-making', algorithmic and 'AI' technologies. These are all systems and software that sit in the background of our everyday lives - monitoring, tracking our actions and movements, extracting data from our devices, and then using this information to make decisions. Algorithmic systems are already a common feature of young people's lives - dictating which targeted advertisement appears when a toddler watches a YouTube video, or perhaps whether a school leaver gets accepted to study at their preferred university.

As such, this calls for rethinking what might have been previously talked about as 'digital literacy' as a form of 'algorithmic literacy'. Some components of this might include:

recognising when data-driven automated systems are being used;

having a basic understanding of how these data-driven automated systems work - what Tania Bucher describes as an 'algorithmic imaginary';

knowing how to algorithmic systems - for example, writing with a natural language processing tool so that it helps (rather than hinders) your creativity;

knowing how to algorithmic systems - for example, using obfuscation tactics to avoid dataveillance;

recognising when human input and outsight is required - for example, knowing when to override an automated decision, or push back against algorithmic bias and automated discrimination.

Developing these new understandings and awareness are important for a number of reasons. On one hand, it is noted that employers are beginning to include familiarity with data and AI as a required employment skill across a range of general occupational areas. Much more importantly, dealing with algorithms is becoming a crucial part of contemporary citizenship. For example, Frank Pasquale talks about the importance of public education in order to counter the emergence of a ' black box society ', where automated decisions are made that citizens are certainly not part of, and usually not aware of.

Indeed, developing these new forms of algorithmic literacy is important if we are to avoid the emergence of new forms of digital inequality and disadvantage. Recent studies highlight the danger of algorithmic understanding being patterned strongly by socio-economic background. Thus, as with any form of digital literacy, young people need to be supported to ensure that algorithmic and automated technologies work in their interests (and not against their interests).

BUILDING ALGORITHMIC LITERACY IN YOUNG PEOPLE - SO WHAT NOW?

Of course, supporting the development of algorithmic literacy presents a challenge to families, educators, youth workers, and anyone else who works with children and young people. Algorithmic understandings and awareness cannot be simply taught in the same ways that one might be taught basic coding skills or how to choose safe passwords. Instead, these are issues that teachers, parents and youth workers need to 'co-learn' children and young people. Algorithmic literacy is a complex and opaque area, where even computer scientists and software developers responsible for developing these systems can be unsure how they actually work. So, this is an area of education that requires adults young people accepting that they all have lots to learn, and then being comfortable learning about it together.

There are already some interesting examples of what these literacy-building activities might look like. For example, there are some great practical examples of educators working with young people to develop toolkits that can support their algorithmic awareness - such as University of Toronto's ' The Algorithmic You' project. Similarly, there are some simple examples of students being supported to develop understandings of how search engine algorithms shape their research, background reading and eventual writing - with students then using these insights to rethink how to engage differently with search strategies and results. Above all, it is important that young people do not encounter algorithmic literacy as a dry abstract concept, but as a dynamic way to actively engage in shaping their digital futures. Alongside the obvious benefits of being able to better navigate digital systems, the development of algorithmic awareness might well lead to direct democratic involvement in the politics of the digital age. In short, algorithmic literacy is likely to be an increasingly important part of digital citizenship in the 2020s. Take, for example, recent cases of UK school students protesting against algorithmic injustices related to automated exam grading, and young people in Ireland protesting against algorithmic targeting of body image and mental health messages on social media. All told, algorithmic activism looks set to be a key part of young people's lives throughout the 2020s and beyond. These are definitely topics for everyone in the DigiGen community to continue thinking about over the next few years.

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What should 'digital literacy' look like in an age of algorithms and AI? Neil Selwyn - DigiGen

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By Neil Selwyn, professor at the faculty of education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Children and young people have long been expected to develop digital skills and knowledge relevant to the technologies of their time. During the 1980s this took the form of 'computer literacy' and 'computer skills' such as learning basic programming commands and how [...]