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Congratulations to the authors: Aaron Erlich, Kevin Aslett, Sarah Graham, and Joshua Tucker! @aaronerlich.bsky.social, @selisegraham.bsky.social ham.bsky.social, @jatucker.bsky.social @kevinaslett.bsky.social

Taken together, the findings highlight that language itself can shape how people judge credibility in multilingual environments. Yet these effects are not uniform: they depend on which language a person prefers, and they don’t necessarily strengthen resilience against misinformation.

We also tested a popular media literacy intervention — “tips to spot false news” — that has been used by platforms like Facebook. While the intervention reduced belief in stories overall, it lowered belief in both true and false stories equally, producing no net gain in discernment. 👇👇

But there was also a tradeoff. Reading in a less-preferred language reduced belief in true stories as well as false ones. In other words, language shifted credibility judgments, but it did not improve people’s ability to distinguish fact from misinformation.

The results were striking. Ukrainian-preferring respondents were less likely to believe both true and false stories when written in Russian. By contrast, Russian-preferring respondents sometimes showed greater belief in false stories when those same stories appeared in Ukrainian.
👇👇

Our goal was simple yet important: to test whether individuals are more or less susceptible to believing false news stories when they are presented in people’s non-preferred language — and to determine if language itself functions as a credibility cue.

Participants were randomly assigned to read stories in their preferred language or their less-preferred language, within days of publication. 👇👇

To study this, we asked bilingual Ukrainians to evaluate news articles in Ukrainian and Russian as to whether they were true, false or misleading, or couldn’t tell.

This means people encounter true and false information in two linguistic environments, one of which is also used in active disinformation campaigns and is the language of the invader in the current war.

Ukraine is a crucial case: most citizens are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, regularly consuming news in both languages.

The paper is co-authored with Bernhard Von Clemm, @ericka.bric.digital
@jonathannagler.bsky.social @magdalenawojciesza.bsky.social

This is also one of the projects I started at @csmapnyu.org ---- thanks to the entire lab involved!

The paper can be found here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Read a longer summary of the paper here: csmapnyu.org/research/aca...

Congrats to the authors @tiagoventura.bsky.social, @rmajumdar.bsky.social, Jonathan Nagler, and @jatucker.bsky.social.

The paper, which is accepted for publication at @The_JOP, can be found here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Our study was a rare field experiment on misinformation in the Global South, adding to a growing call to broaden the geographic and platform scope of causally identified misinformation research.

Big takeaway: WhatsApp matters—but changing exposure does not mechanically change attitudes in the short run.

Political beliefs are hard to change and probably require long-term interventions.

The paper also indicates:

➡️ Platforms like WhatsApp differ fundamentally from traditional feed-based platforms;

➡️ The academic community must spend time studying such platforms; and,

➡️ While difficult to study, it's crucial to explore how those in the Global Majority consume information