At the Information Futures Lab, we aim to build bridges between research and practice
Across the world, public health practitioners, journalists and community organizations are responding to constant waves of sophisticated, misleading health information, both online and offline. It is challenging work, in an environment where regulatory frameworks are only slowly forthcoming, and an evidence-based playbook is not yet available.
The research community has been hard at work trying to tease out if, when and how various types of health misinformation impact people, their actions and their health; and what works to mitigate the potential harms of health misinformation. This effort is made harder by the fact that most online platforms do not openly share relevant data with researchers.
Still, there are now many experimental studies assessing interventions designed to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 misinformation. We reviewed 50 of these studies, published between January 1, 2020 and February 24, 2023, to find out what public health practitioners, journalists, community organizations and others in this space can learn from this growing body of evidence.
This website was built to make the findings and recommendations from this review, as well as additional data and perspectives, broadly available and accessible.
Professor of the Practice
Claire Wardle is co-founder and co-director of the Information Futures Lab, and Professor of the Practice at the Brown School of Public Health. She is considered a leader in the field of misinformation, verification and user generated content, co-authoring the foundational report, Information Disorder: An interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy for the Council of Europe. In 2015, Claire co-founded the non-profit First Draft, a pioneer in innovation, research and practice in the field of misinformation. Over the past decade she has developed an organization-wide training program for the BBC on eyewitness media, verification and misinformation, led social media policy at UNHCR, been a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and been the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania
Research and Investigation Manager
Rory Smith has a background in data journalism, misinformation research and international development. He has worked on violence prevention policy in Latin America and refugee resettlement in Sweden. As a journalist, he has covered various topics from immigration and food policy to politics and organized crime for CNN, Vox, and Vice. Prior to Brown, he was the research manager at First Draft, where he focused on investigating different facets of misinformation.
Program Manager
Daisy Winner is a Program Manager in the Brown University School of Public Health Dean’s Incubator, where she focuses on vaccine equity, health misinformation, and health disparities. In this role, Daisy aims to bring together research, activism, and storytelling to build and strengthen health equity. Prior to Brown, she worked at the Harvard Global Health Institute, where she focused on health misinformation, pandemics, and racial disparities in health and with Seed Global Health where she oversaw a portfolio of projects focused on strengthening medical and nursing education in several sub-Saharan African countries. She holds a BA in Psychology and Global Health from Lesley University.
Professor of the Practice
Stefanie Friedhoff is co-founder and co-director of the Information Futures Lab, and Professor of the Practice at the Brown School of Public Health. She is a leading media, communications and global health strategist, and an expert at knowledge translation, information creation, and verification. From July 2022 to May 2023, she served as a senior policy advisor on the White House Covid-19 Response Team, focusing on population information needs, health equity, community engagement, and medical countermeasure uptake.
At Brown, Friedhoff studies the relationships between information needs, information inequities, and health outcomes. Partnering with creators of trusted information in rapidly changing information ecosystems, she creates co-designing and capacity-building opportunities and research initiatives aimed at meeting the information needs of diverse populations. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, she created research translation and verification projects such as GlobalEpidemics.org and the Preprint Sifter, and co-lead new research and policy initiatives including a pandemic problem solving network, crisis communications guidance, and interventions to build vaccine confidence in communities of color. A veteran journalist and 2001 Nieman Fellow, she served as an expert advisor to the Pew Research Center, an expert contributor to the Covid Collaborative, and a trustee to the Trust for Trauma Journalism.
Research Associate
Kung Chen works in the Brown University School of Public Health Dean’s Incubator where he researches Long COVID, vaccine uptake and equity, and the public health information landscape. Prior to joining Brown, Kung was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a human rights and misinformation undergraduate investigator at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center as well as a Sustainability Fellow at the UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability. Kung holds a BA in Political Science and a BS in Environmental Economics & Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.