The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life: Disinformation Warnings and the Spread of Misinformation Regarding COVID-19

Kevin T. Leicht; Joseph Yun; Brant Houston; Loretta Auvil; Eamon Bracht

doi:10.7758/RSF.2022.8.8.03

Article Information

vol. 8 no. 8 52-68

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2022.8.8.03

Published By

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Print ISSN

2377-8253

Online ISSN

2377-8261

History

Published online December 15, 2022.

© 2022 Russell Sage Foundation. Leicht, Kevin T., Joseph Yun, Brant Houston, Loretta Auvil, and Eamon Bracht. 2022. “The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life: Disinformation Warnings and the Spread of Misinformation Regarding COVID-19.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(8): 52–68. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.8.03. This research is supported by a grant from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-2031768, “Tracking and Network Analysis of the Spread of Misinformation Regarding COVID-19”), and a grant from the Discovery Partners Institute (“Developing Easy-to-Use Application-Based Software to Combat Social Media Misinformation—A Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration”). We thank the participants in and organizers of the Russell Sage Foundation Conference, “The Social and Political Impact of COVID-19 in the United States” (June 10–11, 2021) and the reviewers for their insightful comments. Direct correspondence to: Kevin T. Leicht, at kleicht@illnois.edu, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, United States. Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Author Information

Kevin T. Leicht^a,
Joseph Yun^b,
Brant Houston^c,
Loretta Auvil^d and
Eamon Bracht^e

^aProfessor and past chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States
^bArtificial intelligence and innovation architect and research professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, United States
^cProfessor and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, United States
^dThe National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
^ePh.D. student in the School of Information Sciences Informatics Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States