Elihu Katz Colloquia: Emily Vraga, University of Minnesota

"Making Correction Visible: Strategies to Address Misinformation on Social Media"

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About the Talk

Many solutions have been proposed to reduce the impact of misinformation on social media. Among these solutions, direct public correction of misinformation offers a flexible, scalable, and immediate response to misinformation that celebrates user autonomy. Public correction is especially important because it enables observed correction, reaching many more people than the person being corrected. Observed correction happens quite often on social media and reduces misperceptions of targeted health misinformation across groups in society. But despite the effectiveness of such corrections, social media users, fact checkers, and public health officials express real concerns about the risks of such public corrections. Considering ways to support these corrections remains an important challenge as part of a multi-layered, Swiss-cheese approach to mitigating misinformation.

About the Speaker

Emily Vraga is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication. Her research tests methods to identify and correct misinformation on social media, to apply news literacy to reduce biased processing of media messages, and to encourage attention to more diverse content online. Vraga has published over 80 journal articles in the interdisciplinary fields of communication, political science, journalism, and public health. Her work has informed international health organizations and social media platforms to improve efforts to address misinformation online.