The New York Times – “Researchers have learned plenty about misinformation and how it spreads. But they’re still struggling to figure out how to stop it…Holding the line against misinformation and disinformation is demoralizing and sometimes dangerous work, requiring an unusual degree of optimism and doggedness. Increasingly, however, even the most committed warriors are feeling overwhelmed by the onslaught of false and misleading content online. Researchers have learned a great deal about the misinformation problem over the past decade: They know what types of toxic content are most common, the motivations and mechanisms that help it spread and who it often targets. The question that remains is how to stop it. A critical mass of research now suggests that tools such as fact checks, warning labels, prebunking and media literacy are less effective and expansive than imagined, especially as they move from pristine academic experiments into the messy, fast-changing public sphere. A megastudy conducted last year — the largest ever for testing interventions, with more than 33,000 participants — found mixed results. Interventions like warning labels and digital literacy training improved the ability of participants to judge true or false headlines by only about 5 to 10 percent. Those results are better than nothing, its authors said, but it pales in comparison to the enormous scale of digital misinformation. “I find it hard to say that these initiatives have had a lot of success,” said Chico Q. Camargo, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Exeter who has argued that disinformation research needs reform. Political experts worry that disinformation peddlers, equipped with increasingly sophisticated schemes, will be able to easily bypass weak defenses to influence election results — an increasingly urgent concern, as voters in countries around the globe head to the polls in hotly contested elections.”