Strategies for Improving the Global Information Environment: Results from a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Which design solutions mitigate the impact of misinformation on social media platforms, according to the latest scientific research? This IPIE Summary for Policymakers presents the main findings of two IPIE Synthesis Reports that examine countermeasures to misinformation on social media platforms. These analyses proceed with a collection of scholarly articles about misinformation on social media platforms one of the largest such collections to date — with 4,798 peer-reviewed publications. The first report is a formal systematic review (SR2023.1) that examines the subset of peer-reviewed articles, 588 in total, that use evidence in the analysis of countermeasures for mitigating the effects of misleading information, disinformation, and a range of related phenomena broadly described as misinformation. The second report is a meta-analysis (SR2023.2) that aggregates the findings of the empirical studies about raising the accuracy, believability, credibility, and trustworthiness of social media. It focusses on 43 experiments from 18 publications that meet high standards for generalizable knowledge.