International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on True Costs of Misinformation
Guest-edited by Jonathan Corpus Ong and Joan Donovan, this Special Section on True Costs of Misinformation engages the following key questions: Who pays for the harms and damage brought by misinformation? What are the financial, social, and human costs to society? Whose definitions and measures of digital harms matter when coordinating a global response? Crucially, what is the future of disinformation studies? What concepts and debates should disinformation scholars continue to engage with, and what methodologies and advocacy strategies need to be discarded?
This Special Section gathers articles written by senior and junior scholars who attended an international and interdisciplinary workshop of the same name in March 2022. Most of these papers were written during a more hopeful and less risky “peak moment” for tech accountability and tech justice advocacy especially in the United States. These papers collectively offer powerful critiques to the foundational frameworks and methodologies in disinformation studies and the tech-first, top-down, and U.S.-centric interventions industry.
In this first paper, Alice Marwick and Katherine Furl offer extremism and radicalization researchers a framework to study “redpilling” as a process as they advocate for long-term, values-based interventions. In the second paper, Amogh Dhar Sharma presents a model of deep ethnographic investigation that move beyond examining disinformation as content to explore how politicians in India misuse state resources and funnel “black money” to reward media manipulators who help them stay in power. Three papers deal with the important yet overlooked issue of audience reception of misinformation and conspiracy theories-across diverse contexts of the Asian diaspora in the United Sates (Rachel Kuo, Madhavi Reddi, and Lan Li), audiences in Kenya and Senegal (Dani Madrid Morales, Melissa Tully, Kevin C. Mudavadi, Frankline Matanji, and Layire Diop), and political fans in the Philippines (Nicole Curato and Sofia Tomacruz). Finally, Samantha Bradshaw, Gabrielle Lim, and Monzima Haque critique the global diffusion of anti-fake news legislation in a global context and how a more inclusive and context-aware approach is less vulnerable to authoritarian capture than the mainstream securitization frame.
With their critical, contextual, and community-driven approaches mindful of global differences and inequalities, these papers prompt powerful reflection on what the field in its peak moment got right–and also what it got wrong in both its research and activist methodologies.
We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on June 10, 2025. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback!
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The True Costs of Misinformation—Introduction
Jonathan Corpus Ong, Joan Donovan
Mountains of Evidence: Processual “Redpilling” as a Socio-Technical Effect of Disinformation
Alice E. Marwick, Katherine Furl
Political Finance and Patronage Behind Disinformation: Evidence From India’s Election Campaigns
Amogh Dhar Sharma
Transnational Information Networks: Methods for Cross-Diasporic Research
Rachel Kuo, Madhavi Reddi, Lan Li
Exploring Audience Agency in Countering Misinformation
Dani Madrid-Morales, Melissa Tully, Kevin C. Mudavadi, Frankline Matanji, Layire Diop
How Conspiracy Theories Harm Deliberative Democracy
Nicole Curato, Sofia Tomacruz
The Global Spread of Misinformation Laws
Samantha Bradshaw, Gabrielle Lim, Monzima Haque
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Silvio Waisbord, Editor
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Andrew Taylor, Webmaster
Jonathan Corpus Ong, Joan Donovan, Guest Editors
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USC Annenberg Press 