[Air-L] New Report: How Users Make Sense of Misinformation Warnings on Personal Messaging

[Natalie-Anne Hall]

Hi all,


(With apologies for cross-posting)


On behalf of the Everyday Misinformation Project at the Online Civic Culture Centre, Loughborough University, we wanted to share our latest report “Beyond Quick Fixes: How Users Make Sense of Misinformation Warnings on Personal Messaging”<https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/online-civic-culture-centre/news-events/articles/o3c-4-beyond-quick-fixes/>. The report uncovers multiple interpretations users have of WhatsApp’s “forwarded” and “forwarded many times” tags. Based on these findings, it puts forward five key principles for the design of effective misinformation warnings.



You can access the report here: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/online-civic-culture-centre/news-events/articles/o3c-4-beyond-quick-fixes/



This comes at an important time, as the Online Safety Bill is currently being debated in the UK House of Lords. That bill requires social media providers to take responsibility for harmful content published on their platforms, including misinformation. However, for encrypted apps such as WhatsApp, this could potentially mean compromising end-to-end encryption in order to monitor and censor messages, something Meta says it is not prepared to do.



Our report shows that these platforms can protect user privacy, whilst also doing more to tackle misinformation.



You can read the Loughborough University press release here:

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2023/june/whatsapp-forwarded-tags-misunderstood-report/



We hope you find the report insightful and useful. Please don’t hesitate to get in contact with any questions.



The Everyday Misinformation Project Team

Natalie-Anne Hall, Brendan T Lawson, Cristian Vaccari and Andrew Chadwick

http://everyday-mis.info<http://everyday-mis.info/>

everyday.sharing at mailbox.lboro.ac.uk