This volume explores the evolving landscape of misinformation, disinformation, fake news and fact-checking in the media and the public domain. It highlights the prominence misinformation poses to society tracing its relationship with weakening institutions and assaults on freedom of the press and academic freedom.
Organized into four thematic dimensions—fact-checking institutions, practices, publics, and algorithms, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the field’s development. The concluding chapter reflects on recent disruptions, including the current shift from professional fact-checkers toward community-based moderation, raising urgent questions about platform governance. It outlines a forward-looking agenda focused on three key actors—platform companies, professional fact-checkers, and publics.
This collection brings together essays and research published in Digital Journalism with a new introductory and concluding chapter. It is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers navigating the complex intersections of fact-checking and misinformation in the digital age.
Table of Contents:
Research into Fact-checking: Introducing the State of the Art in the Field 1. Considering Interinstitutional Visibilities in Combating Misinformation 2. Digital Infrastructures of COVID-19 Misinformation: A New Conceptual and Analytical Perspective on Fact-Checking 3. Facing Fakes: Understanding Tech Platforms’ Responses to Online Falsehoods 4. The Watchdog Role of Fact-Checkers in Different Media Systems 5. Debunking False Information: Investigating Journalists’ Fact-Checking Skills 6. From Public Reason to Public Health: Professional Implications of the “Debunking Turn” in the Global Fact-Checking Field 7. The Logics of Fact-Checking Website Operations 8. Epistemology of Fact Checking: An Examination of Practices and Beliefs of Fact Checkers Around the World 9. Show Me the Facts: Newsroom-Affiliated and Independent Fact-Checkers’ Transparency Acts 10. Cutting through the Hype: Understanding the Implications of Deepfakes for the Fact-Checking Actor-Network 11. The Corrective Effect of Fact-Checking and Hostile Media Perceptions: A Three-Way Interaction Model between Social Media News Usage and Political Misperceptions 12. Divides in News Verification: Antecedents and Political Outcomes of News Verification by Age 13. Factbait: Emotionality of Fact-Checking Tweets and Users’ Engagement during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and the COVID-19 Pandemic 14. The Alternative Truth Kept Hidden From Us: The Effects of Multimodal Disinformation Disseminated by Ordinary Citizens and Alternative Hyper-Partisan Media: Evidence From the US and India 15. Dominant Disciplinary and Thematic Approaches to Automated Fact-Checking: A Scoping Review and Reflection 16. A Case of Claims and Facts: Automated Fact-Checking the Future of Journalism’s Authority 17. AI as an Apolitical Referee: Using Alternative Sources to Decrease Partisan Biases in the Processing of Fact-Checking Messages 18. Do You Speak Disinformation? Computational Detection of Deceptive News-Like Content Using Linguistic and Stylistic Features 19. Advancing a research agenda Amid Misinformation: Platform Companies, Professional Fact-Checkers, and Publics
About the Author :
Oscar Westlund (PhD) is a Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University since 2018, where he co-leads the OsloMet Digital Journalism Research Group and has institutionalized its OsloMet DJRG fellowship that has attracted more than 30 fellows from all over the world. Westlund is the Editor-in-Chief of Digital Journalism (since 2018), an internationally leading journal in communication for which he has introduced several new article formats. He has authored and edited multiple books, as well as 100+ articles, chapters and reports. His award-winning research focuses on journalism, social media, mobile media, misinformation, fact-checking as well as media- and information literacy. Westlund has worked at several renowned universities in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. He was a visiting scholar RISJ at University of Oxford in 2011, and acts as the Sweden representative for the annual RISJ Digital News Report project. Westlund and his colleagues have been awarded and carried out research projects granted by national research councils in Norway, Sweden, Spain and Singapore. Westlund has worked as a research leader at the Government Offices of Sweden and served several EU inquiries. In 2026 he is a visiting professor at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology (PJAIT) and a faculty associate at the Public Tech Media Lab at University of Wisconsin. Westlund continues to serve as chair of the advisory board for the Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder (NORDIS) since 2021. NORDIS is an independent non-partisan multidisciplinary hub for the EU Digital Media Observatory.
