Misinformation On Social Platforms A Review And Research Agenda

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 18, 2025, 9:19 PM

misinformation on social platforms a review and research agenda

Received 2021 May 31; Accepted 2022 Jan 6; Issue date 2022. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. The spread of misinformation in social media has become a severe threat to public interests. For example, several incidents of public health concerns arose out of social media misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Against the backdrop of the emerging IS research focus on social media and the impact of misinformation during recent events such as the COVID-19, Australian Bushfire, and the USA elections, we identified disaster, health,...

Following a systematic review process, we chose 28 articles, relevant to the three themes, for synthesis. We discuss the characteristics of misinformation in the three domains, the methodologies that have been used by researchers, and the theories used to study misinformation. We adapt an Antecedents-Misinformation-Outcomes (AMIO) framework for integrating key concepts from prior studies. Based on the AMIO framework, we further discuss the inter-relationships of concepts and the strategies to control the spread of misinformation on social media. Ours is one of the early reviews focusing on social media misinformation research, particularly on three socially sensitive domains; disaster, health, and politics. This review contributes to the emerging body of knowledge in Data Science and social media and informs strategies to combat social media misinformation.

Keywords: Misinformation, Information disorder, Social media, Systematic literature review Rumors, misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information are common challenges confronting media of all types. It is, however, worse in the case of digital media, especially on social media platforms. Ease of access and use, speed of information diffusion, and difficulty in correcting false information make control of undesirable information a horrid task [1]. Alongside these challenges, social media has also been highly influential in spreading timely and useful information. For example, the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement was enabled by social media, which united concurring people's solidarity across the world when George Floyd was killed due to police brutality, and so are 2011 Arab spring...

Although, scholars have addressed information disorder in social media, a synthesis of the insights from these studies are rare. Part of the book series: Human Dynamics in Smart Cities ((HDSC)) This chapter offers a critical review of research on misinformation and social networking sites (SNSs). Using keywords related to misinformation and SNSs, this review examines relevant scholarship published since 2004. Content of relevant articles is summarized in terms of examined contexts, involved disciplines (e.g., public health, communication), methodological approaches, use of theory, and solutions presently offered for addressing this important problem. Disinformation and fake news are also included in the scope of this review.

Current trends in research on misinformation and SNSs will be discussed. Results of this review suggest that misinformation on SNSs represents an issue facing many fields without a clear or easy solution. Four recommendations are derived from the present review: (1) performance of additional research on platforms other than Facebook or Twitter; (2) clarification of conceptualizations of misinformation and increased consistency in usage of terms; (3)... Directions for future research are also provided. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31, 211–236. A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.© Copyright 2025 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)Cite this article There is an urgent need for targeted, evidence-based interventions to build resilience to misinformation among social media’s most avid users: adolescents. Research on misinformation susceptibility is mostly focused on adults. However, adolescents encounter different types of (mis)information and undergo rapid social, emotional and cognitive changes. These changes can increase vulnerability to misinformation through social influence, emotional manipulation and cognitive biases, while also offering unique opportunities for resilience. Taking a developmental perspective, we outline how adolescents’ susceptibility to misinformation differs from that of adults, propose a research agenda to systematically study these processes and introduce a Bayesian framework of belief updating tailored...

Finally, we highlight how these insights inform age-appropriate interventions to promote resilience. This Perspective underscores the vital role that social sciences have in understanding and combating the harmful influence of misinformation on youth’s beliefs and behaviours, while leveraging their strengths. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription Received 2022 Oct 20; Revised 2023 Jan 7; Accepted 2023 Jan 12; Issue date 2023.

This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. Online social networks (OSNs) are rapidly growing and have become a huge source of all kinds of global and local news for millions of users. However, OSNs are a double-edged sword. Although the great advantages they offer such as unlimited easy communication and instant news and information, they can also have many disadvantages and issues. One of their major challenging issues is the spread of fake news.

Fake news identification is still a complex unresolved issue. Furthermore, fake news detection on OSNs presents unique characteristics and challenges that make finding a solution anything but trivial. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are still incapable of overcoming this challenging problem. To make matters worse, AI techniques such as machine learning and deep learning are leveraged to deceive people by creating and disseminating fake content. Consequently, automatic fake news detection remains a huge challenge, primarily because the content is designed in a way to closely resemble the truth, and it is often hard to determine its veracity by AI... This work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of fake news research as well as a fundamental review of existing approaches used to detect and prevent fake news from spreading via OSNs.

We present the research problem and the existing challenges, discuss the state of the art in existing approaches for fake news detection, and point out the future research directions in tackling the challenges. Keywords: Fake news, Disinformation, Misinformation, Information disorder, Online deception, Online social networks Fake news, disinformation and misinformation have become such a scourge that Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, is quoted to have said (making an implicit reference to... Indeed, although online social networks (OSNs), also called social media, have improved the ease with which real-time information is broadcast; its popularity and its massive use have expanded the spread of fake news by... Fake news may refer to the manipulation of information that can be carried out through the production of false information, or the distortion of true information. However, that does not mean that this problem is only created with social media.

A long time ago, there were rumors in the traditional media that Elvis was not dead,2 that the Earth was flat,3 that aliens had invaded us,4, etc.

Misinformation On Social Platforms A Review And Research Agenda

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