Research Projects

Research Projects

The Everyday Misinformation Project

O3C was awarded a significant grant from the Leverhulme Trust to examine why people share false and misleading information on personal messaging platforms.

Professor Andrew Chadwick, the project’s Principal Investigator and Professor Cristian Vaccari (Co-Investigator) were awarded £347,000 from the Trust’s prestigious Research Project Grant scheme for the study. Their proposal was submitted in May 2019, the award was made in March 2020. The start of the project was delayed until March 1, 2021 due to the global Coronavirus pandemic and ran until 2024.

As well as looking at the sharing of misinformation on messaging platforms such as Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, the research has advanced knowledge of why some individuals challenge false and misleading information and decide not to share it online.

The project involved significant fieldwork and full-time and part-time postdoctoral research assistants.

Visit the Project Website to learn more.

The New Crisis of Public Communication

This work examined the changing nature of deception; biases and vulnerabilities in the attention economy; post-truth identities; disinformation-based misogynist extremism; the role of social media exposure and conspiracy mentality in Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy; the role of deepfakes in distrust of media; and the role of social media exposure in explaining the spread of false and misleading information during UK election campaigns. Further information.

O3C Public Reports 

O3C 5: Research Update: Misinformation on Personal Messaging—Are WhatsApp’s Warnings Effective? (2024)

The data come from the Everyday Misinformation Project's nationally-representative survey of 2,000 members of the public. This new evidence allowed us to generalise about how those among the UK public who use personal messaging actually interpret the “forwarded” and “forwarded many times” misinformation warning tags. Download and read the report.

O3C 4: Beyond Quick Fixes: How Users Make Sense of Misinformation Warnings on Personal Messaging (2023)

The Everyday Misinformation Project used its longitudinal qualitative panel to ask: Do the "forwarded" tags on WhatsApp make sense? Read what they found.

O3C 3: Covid Vaccines and Online Personal Messaging: The Challenge of Challenging Everyday Misinformation (2022)

Read this April 2022 report from the Everyday Misinformation Project examining the social norms that shape whether and how people fail to challenge Covid vaccine misinformation on personal messaging.

O3C 2: The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics (2019)

Download this December 2019 state-of-the-field think piece by Andrew Chadwick.

O3C 1: News Sharing on UK Social Media: Misinformation, Disinformation, and Correction (2019)

Download the pioneering May 2019 Survey Report—one of the first studies explaining why people share false and misleading information online—by Andrew Chadwick and Cristian Vaccari.

PhD Research Projects

Harvey Dodds

Primary Supervisor: Professor Andrew Chadwick
Secondary Supervisors: Dr Martin Sykora, Professor Cristian Vaccari (External)

Harvey holds a BA in Politics from the University of Leeds and an MA in Social Psychology from the University of Edinburgh. His project examined the relationship between social media representations and perceptions of social class.

Andrew R. N. Ross

Primary Supervisor: Professor Andrew Chadwick 
Secondary Supervisor: Professor Cristian Vaccari (External)

Andrew holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Durham and an MA in Politics from the University of East Anglia and his MA dissertation was published as a research article in New Media & Society. His project investigates the influence of social media cues and other online cues on citizens' perceptions of the impact of disinformation - the so-called 'influence of presumed influence' - and its implications for the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions.

Dr Rachel Armitage (awarded 2023)

Primary supervisor: Dr Martin Sykora.
Secondary supervisors: Professor Cristian Vaccari, Dr Cristian Tileagă.

Rachel arrived at O3C with First Class Honours in Political Science from the University of Birmingham, where she also won the H. S. Ferns Prize for outstanding achievement. She has also worked for Bite the Ballot, Nottingham City Council, and the UK DCMS. Rachel's PhD focused on individual resilience skills that equip individual users to recognise and challenge online misinformation and disinformation. Following her PhD defence, she moved to a role as an Online Safety Policy Associate at Ofcom.

Dr Catherine R. Baker (awarded 2022)

Primary supervisor: Professor Andrew Chadwick.
Secondary supervisors: Professor Tom Jackson, Dr Line Nyhagen, Dr Cristian Tileagă.

Catherine’s PhD, ‘Infrastructures of Male Supremacism: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Incel Wiki’ combined digital affordances and discursive psychology perspectives to explain how the Incel wiki functions as a rhetorical tool to inoculate misogynist Incels against criticism while simultaneously reinforcing ingroup identity and semantic control. She showed how pseudo-science functions as a particularly important, and previously under-researched, rhetorical strategy of extreme misogyny, and positioned biological determinism as a central organising logic of male supremacism. Catherine holds a First Class Honours Degree in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin, where she also worked as a research assistant in the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience. Her research was funded by the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C). After her PhD Catherine became an Irish Research Council (IRC) Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute for Research on Genders and Sexualities (IRGS) at Dublin City University (DCU) and has published widely on addressing the challenge of male supremacist online influencers.

Dr Dayei Oh (awarded 2022)

Primary supervisor: Dr Line Nyhagen
Secondary supervisors: Professor John Downey, Dr Suzanne Elayan, 

Dr Dayei Oh completed her PhD in April 2022. She holds an MA with Distinction in International Media and Communication from the University of Nottingham and previously worked at the Associated Press (AP). Her research focused on emotions and incivility in pro-abortion and anti-abortion discourse on social media in the UK, Ireland, and South Korea. Her research was funded by the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C). After her PhD Dayei became a postdoctoral researcher at the Datafication Research Initiative at the University of Helsinki's Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities.

Previous PhD Researchers

Meghan E. Conroy

Meghan’s PhD research examined extreme right-wing online influencers in the United States. Her project was funded by the Online Civic Culture Centre at Loughborough University. In January 2022, Meghan suspended her doctoral research in order to become a full-time policy advisor (Professional Staff Member) to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Her supervisors were Professor Andrew Chadwick, Professor Louise Cooke, and Dr Suzanne Elayan.