Beyond quick fixes: How users make sense of misinformation warnings on personal messaging

Based in the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) and the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (CRCC) at Loughborough University, the Everyday Misinformation Project is a three-year study funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

The project’s aim is to develop a better-contextualised understanding of why people share and correct misinformation online.

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

Crucially, however, communication on personal messaging is never entirely defined by its privacy.

Rather, these services are best understood as hybrid public-interpersonal communication environments. They weave constant, often emotionally intimate, connection into the fabric of everyday life and are used mainly to maintain relationships with strong ties, such as family, friends, parents, co-workers, and local communities. Yet often the information shared on these services comes from media and information sources in the public worlds of news, politics, science, and entertainment, before it then cascades across private groups, often losing markers of provenance along the way.

Personal messaging involves private, interpersonal, and public communication in a variety of subtle, complex, and constantly shifting ways. Understanding how this shapes the spread and the correction of misinformation requires sensitivity to unique affordances and patterns of use. This is our project.

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

The fieldwork has three strands:

● Longitudinal in-depth qualitative interviews with 102 members of the public based in three regions of the UK, recruited to roughly reflect the diversity of British society in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, educational attainment, and a basic indicator of digital literacy.

● Analysis of personal messaging content the participants voluntarily upload to personal online diaries via a mobile smartphone app.

● Multi-wave nationally representative panel surveys and experiments, to be designed based on findings from the first two strands of fieldwork.

This is the second public-facing report from the project. It presents findings based on the first and second strands of the fieldwork. Visit https://everyday-mis.info for more information.