Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy

2023/10/19 by Stephan Lewandowsky, Ullrich K.H. Ecker, John Cook +3 · 1 voice · 64 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Democracy #Disinformation #Epistemology #Frontier #Law #Media Influence and Politics #Misinformation #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Psychology #Social Media and Politics #Social media

paper · doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101711

published in Current Opinion in Psychology 54, 101711 (Elsevier BV)

openalex publication_date 2023/10/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate. We review the evidence for widespread disinformation campaigns that are undermining this shared knowledge. We establish a common pattern by which science and scientists are discredited and how the most recent frontier in those attacks involves researchers in misinformation itself. We list several ways in which psychology can contribute to countermeasures.

Citations

• How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S.

Cited by

• Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online
• Liars know they are lying: differentiating disinformation from disagreement
• Fact‐checking election‐campaign misinformation: Impacts on noncommitted voters' feelings and behavior
• Misinformation as strategy: Epistemic consequences and the undermining of shared truth
• Critical ignoring when information abundance is detrimental to democracy
• Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think
• The role of epistemic drift in online civic discourse about science
• Spreading False Content in Political Campaigns: Disinformation in the 2024 European Parliament Elections
• GenAI and misinformation in education: a systematic scoping review of opportunities and challenges
• ‘Google this!’ How performative links and search engines organise information disorders in a climate obstruction network
• Building resilience against online misinformation: A teacher-led training promoting evaluation strategies among lower secondary students
• The epistemic crisis and the rise of the far right: toward a conceptualization of counter-knowledge orders in digital knowledge society
• Tune in to the prebunking network! Development and validation of six inoculation videos that prebunk manipulation tactics and logical fallacies in misinformation
• Emancipatory Information Retrieval
• Considering information-sharing motives to reduce misinformation
• Don't believe them! Reducing misinformation influence through source discreditation. [europepmc]
• Question framing affects accurate-inaccurate discrimination in responses to sharing questions, but not in responses to accuracy questions. [europepmc]

Discussions

• Lewandowsky et al. (2023): Epistemic integrity of democracy & misinformation (doi.org/10.1016/j.co...). We make the basic point that democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge. Citizens may disagr [bsky, 66 points, 3 comments]

Related

• Propaganda, Misinformation, and the Epistemic Value of Democracy
• Misinformation as strategy: Epistemic consequences and the undermining of shared truth
• Liars know they are lying: differentiating disinformation from disagreement
• Misinformation
• Prominent misinformation interventions reduce misperceptions but increase scepticism