Early Identification: Memes and Media

Computer-mediated modalities are quickly becoming the primary means by which people communicate and gather information about the world around them. As communication and information modalities change, societally, we often experience adverse effects in ways that were unpredictable, we were not prepared for, or both. Recently, national and global phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 US Election uncertainty, wherein trust-worthy information dissemination was vital, exposed pitfalls in our shifting communication landscape which led to disastrous outcomes. My research and science communication work investigates the behavior of information spread by focusing on how information in general diffuses and the ways that misinformation and disinformation might be differentiable from that. To that end, in this dissertation, I present several standalone pieces of research that aim to answer the same question from different perspectives: Can we Identify Misinformation?