Toni G. L. A. van der Meer

During crises, when falsehoods often spread faster than facts, journalists face the challenge of deciding how to fight misinformation without amplifying its reach. This study focuses on Dutch journalists who addressed pandemic-related misinformation during the COVID-19 crisis (January 2020–May 2023), distinguishing between actively interventionist strategies (correction and prebunking) and more detached approaches. Drawing on a content analysis of 698 news articles, it investigates the use of actively interventionist strategies, and their variation across pandemic phases and in their use of expert sources. Findings show that 14.2% of articles adopted actively interventionist roles, with corrections being more common than prebunking. Such strategies were more frequent during the initial uncertain phase of the pandemic and during vaccine rollouts. Articles using these strategies relied on a greater number and diversity of sources, especially academic, governmental, and health-related. The results highlight a cautious engagement by journalists in actively countering misinformation, favoring a more detached reporting. Overall, the study advances the understanding of journalistic role performance in health crises and the interplay between journalism practice and misinformation management.

Background: One of the multiple challenges associated with misinformation is its risk of hindering public health efforts during a health crisis. Misinformation can cover a diversity of thematic topics and is usually spread using a series of nontopic-specific recurring narrative structures. Identifying these 2 misinformation features helps to understand underlying structures and patterns through which misleading information can take shape or be circulated. Objective: The goal of the study is to obtain a complete overview of the topics and narratives of pandemic-related misinformation cases addressed by 2 key information providers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands: news media and public health authorities. Methods: A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 698 news articles and 1333 tweets published between January 2020 and May 2023. Results: The study revealed that vaccine-related misinformation, both in terms of topics and narratives, was the most frequently addressed type of misinformation across both sources. The topics and narratives evolved along the pandemic, with the virus origin and danger being more predominant in the misinformation addressed in the early phases and the vaccines gaining presence around 2021. Conclusions: In total, the study revealed the dominance of vaccine-related narratives as well as the change of misinformation features over time. The deeper understanding of misinformation topics and narratives can inform communication strategies to counter its effects, focusing on the appropriate topics and narrative structures in different moments.

Journalism plays a pivotal role in keeping societally important issues visible to the public. This role becomes even more pressing in the case of persistent social issues (e.g., climate change, agi...

The growing integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how organizations prepare for and manage crises. This study examines cultural conditions that support GenAI READINESS through 11 interviews with communication experts. Findings reveal that GenAI READINESS is primarily a cultural, not technical, condition shaped by leadership behavior, mindset, and alignment across organizational values and assumptions. Interviewees emphasized the need for ethical standards, training, and psychological safety, while noting faster adaptation demands and new reputational risks compared to prior technological shifts. Implications for incorporating GenAI for organizational READINESS are discussed.

Today’s world faces a range of persistent social issues, such as climate change and aging populations (United Nations, 2025), which are complex and multilayered by nature: they unfold slowly over t...

Perceiving misinformation as a threat can have broad implications for society, yet how audiences arrive at such perceptions is not well understood. Using focus groups in Germany ( N = 30), we examine perceived consequences, origins, and signals of misinformation threats. Participants view misinformation as abstract and multifaceted. Perceived consequences span personal to societal harms, while origins are often attributed to distant actors or technology. Assessments are shaped by general attitudes, biases, and sociopolitical contexts, as participants rely largely on affective, collective judgments rather than direct experience. The study highlights high perceived threats across different dimensions despite limited concrete signals.

Political deepfakes potentially undermine democracy by amplifying socio-political divides in hyper-realistic manners. As an important next step in understanding the political consequences of deepfakes, this article reports on the longer-term effects of deepfakes across two different political settings: The US and the Netherlands. We conducted three-wave pre-registered experiments spanning a full week in which we exposed participants in the US and the Netherlands to realistic political deepfakes. We found that, in both political settings, exposure to deepfakes lowered support for the targeted political actor. This effect was strongest for people initially supporting the attacked politician. Although deepfakes had a delegitimizing impact, they were rated as substantially less credible than authentic videos. Although fact-checks were able to lower the credibility of deepfakes, the delegitimizing impact of deepfakes was resilient to corrections. These findings highlight the continued influence of corrected deepfakes on political beliefs.

Although visual and AI-generated disinformation have been associated with alarming political consequences, we currently lack a clear empirical understanding of the effects of different forms of visual disinformation. Against this background, we rely on a pre-registered experimental study in the United States ( N = 982) in which we exposed participants to various modes of textual and visual disinformation on two different issues: The disappearance of flight MH370 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Findings show that, for MH370, there was no difference in credibility between textual, AI-generated, or video-based disinformation. Yet, for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, video-based disinformation was perceived as more credible than textual or image-based disinformation. Our findings indicate that the consequences of visual disinformation are context-bound: Especially in the case of polarizing issues, the out-of-context placement of videos can serve as a plausible form of deceptive evidence.