NPR relies on research from IDI affiliate, Briony Swire-Thompson, to share six ways to combat misinformation:

“We just don’t have the time, the cognitive resources or even the motivation to literally fact-check every piece of information that comes our way,” says Briony Swire-Thompson, director of the Psychology of Misinformation Lab at Northeastern University.

Hear from Rebekah Tromble in Nature and learn more about the Researcher Support Consortium.

“It’s universities and the academic institutions that have the primary responsibility to act,” says Rebekah Tromble, who leads the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University in Washington DC, and has herself experienced harassment because of her professional work. “They are the employers, and frankly it’s the type of public-interest scholarship that they are incentivizing that puts scholars at risk.”

Tune in to the Election Listening Newsletter by IDI’s Jason Radford. Each week, get a summary in your inbox of the trends in the online conversation real Americans are having about the U.S. election. In addition, view a dashboard where you can see these data for yourself.

Where does the data come from, you ask? We use Brandwatch to summarize the conversation being had by 1.8 million US voters on X. If you want to find out more about the data, the dashboard, or this work, check out the FAQ on the dashboard. If you have any questions, direct them to the projects’ director Dr. Jason Radford j.radford@northeastern.edu.

Voter suppression was a major issue during the 2018 U.S. Midterm elections. Civil rights organizations, advocacy groups, and celebrities used Twitter to urgently warn voters about potential problems at the polls. However, new research from IDI’s Katherine Haenschen shows, in an effort to raise awareness, these messages had the potential to negatively impact key measures of democratic health. Tweets that highlight voter suppression without a solution depress confidence in elections across all party groups, suggesting that solely warning people about problems at the polls without concrete actions they can take in response may do more harm than good. In addition, tweets highlighting voter suppression increase democratic legitimacy among Republicans relative to Democrats, suggesting that the former see such efforts as beneficial.