Adopting an Ecological Approach to Misinformation: Understanding the Broader Scope and Impacts of Misinformation on Online Communities

Abstract Misinformation plays a significant role in people's lives. While numerous interventions are designed to address misinformation and its impacts, these interventions primarily focus on addressing individual pieces of false and misleading content. This dissertation argues that such individualistic focus on misinformation de-emphasizes and draws attention away from the broader scope and impacts of misinformation. Instead, it advocates for conceiving of misinformation as a broad societal phenomenon that transcends any isolated, individual pieces of false or misleading content. This perspective to misinformation, in particular, emphasizes the crucial role of community-oriented mechanisms in the broader scope and impacts of misinformation, which are often under-looked in individualistic approaches to misinformation. Therefore, to study the broader scope of misinformation, and to account for the community-oriented mechanisms involved in this phenomenon, this dissertation takes an ecological approach to misinformation. Specifically, in an experimental setting, it demonstrates how false and misleading content, and community responses to such content, together contribute to the way misinformation influences perceptions about social norms within online communities, underscoring the way misinformation impacts online communities beyond misleading their members about any individual pieces of content. To examine the interplay between false and misleading content, and community responses in authentic online interactions in an observational setting, it then embraces the concept of framing from sociological research, and demonstrates how these elements and the interplay between them together contribute to the shifts in the way people come to understand the world's events, again impacting online communities beyond misleading their individual members about any individual pieces of content. The approach taken in this dissertation serves as an example that can inform how future research might adopt an ecological approach to misinformation, and further expand knowledge about the broader scope and impacts of this phenomenon. This dissertation concludes by outlining the implications that it offers for researchers to study misinformation's broader scope, for community moderators to expand their moderation practices beyond individual content moderation, and for social media designers to leverage the role of community members in addressing the broader impacts of misinformation on how their communities run and evolve.