"The proliferation of political mis/disinformation on social media has led many scholars to embrace “inoculation” techniques, where individuals are trained to identify the signs of low-veracity information prior to exposure. Coordinated information operations frequently spread mis/disinformation ... through inauthentic or “troll” accounts that appear to be trustworthy members to the targeted polity, as in Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 US presidential election. We experimentally tested the efficacy of inoculation against inauthentic online actors, using the Spot the Troll Quiz, a free, online educational tool that teaches how to spot markers of inauthenticity. Inoculation works in this setting. Across an online US nationally representative sample (N = 2,847), which also oversampled older adults, we find that taking the Spot the Troll Quiz (vs. playing a simple game) significantly increases participants’ accuracy in identifying trolls among a set of Twitter accounts that are novel to participants. This inoculation also reduces participants’ self-efficacy in identifying inauthentic accounts and reduced the perceived reliability of fake news headlines, although it had no effect on affective polarization. And while accuracy in the novel troll-spotting task is negatively associated with age and Republican party identification, the Quiz is equally effective on older adults and Republicans as it was on younger adults and Democrats." (Abstract) more

"This paper attempts to measure the impact of naturally occurring media frames on public support for a policy. Content analysis of network nightly news during late October of 2001 reveals that U.S. media framed the events of September 11 in terms of both war and crime. A concurrent survey of 328 Ten ... nesseans reveals that rather than adopting either a war frame or a crime frame, audiences combined elements of these media frames in various ways and that their subsequent understanding of the events of September 11 had an impact on their support for the war in Afghanistan. The results reveal the complexity of the framing phenomenon in natural environments and suggest the need for better measures of how audiences perceive media frames as well as further investigation into framing as a means of coalition building." (Abstract) more