Global Media, Fact-Checking, Information Disorder and Digital Public Sphere Research Unit

The Global Media, Fact-Checking, Information Disorder and Digital Public Sphere Research Unit investigates how societies organize the verification of public claims in digital communication environments. As political communication increasingly unfolds on platform-mediated infrastructures, the production, circulation, and correction of information are no longer confined to traditional news organizations. Instead, a diverse set of actors—including journalists, fact-checking organizations, digital platforms and social media, influencers, audiences, political actors, and belief communities—participate in public discourse and the production of knowledge.

The research unit examines how these actors interact and how verification practices emerge, diffuse, and become institutionalized within contemporary media systems. Particular attention is given to the role of fact-checking organizations as new actors in journalism and public communication, as well as the ways in which platform and social media algorithmically driven architectures shape the visibility, circulation, and correction of misinformation.

A central focus of the unit is the transnational dynamics of misinformation and verification. Digital platforms enable misleading claims to circulate across borders, while fact-checking initiatives increasingly operate within international networks and collaborative infrastructures. The unit analyzes how verification flows, platform partnerships, and journalistic practices contribute to the emergence of globally interconnected public spheres and explores ways to safeguard their normative ideals. A strong focus is placed on cross-regional comparisons between the European Union and regions of the Global South.

The group also examines the implications of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for journalism and democratic communication. AI-generated content, synthetic media, and automated information production are transforming both the scale and forms of misinformation. The unit investigates how journalists, fact-checkers, public actors, and platforms respond to these developments and how verification practices evolve in response to increasingly sophisticated forms of synthetic and AI-assisted disinformation, including in domains such as climate change, gender, and elections.

The research program combines insights from global media and communication studies, journalism studies, social movements, and political communication to advance theoretical understanding of how authority over truth claims is negotiated in platformized public spheres. Methodologically, the unit adopts a comparative mixed-methods approach, integrating computational techniques—such as topic modelling and network analysis—with large-scale traditional content analysis and qualitative methods, including interviews, frame analysis, discourse analysis, and document-institutional analysis. This multi-level strategy enables the study of misinformation ecosystems across platforms, media organizations, and fact-checking initiatives, linking macro-level information flows with meso-level institutional structures and micro-level journalistic practices.

The research unit focuses on several interrelated themes:

• the institutionalization and global diffusion of fact-checking journalism
• verification practices and editorial decision-making in fact-checking organizations
• the platformization of fact-checking and media verification infrastructures
• transnational disinformation flows and cross-border verification networks
• comparative media systems and journalism in diverse political and regulatory contexts
• journalism, dis-misinformation, and media transformations in the Global South
• the implications of generative AI and synthetic media for journalism, dis-misinformation, and verification practices
• climate change, gender, and electoral disinformation across the globe

Through interdisciplinary collaboration and international partnerships, the unit seeks to advance empirical and theoretical knowledge on how contemporary societies produce, contest, and verify public knowledge in digital media environments, and how these processes shape democratic public spheres.

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