Faculty-Led Special Issue Examines Information Integrity in the Digital Age

  • by Richard W Huskey

Quick Summary

  • UC Davis Communication faculty co-edit a new special issue of the Journal of Media Psychology exploring how misinformation, algorithms, and public trust intersect in today’s digital media landscape.
Man with glasses. Ones and zeros, like binary code, are projected onto his face.

The Department of Communication at UC Davis is proud to announce the publication of a new special issue of the Journal of Media Psychology titled Information Integrity in a Digital Age. The issue was co-edited by UC Davis faculty members Drs. Richard Huskey, Heather Hether, and Soojong Kim, and features seven peer-reviewed articles that investigate the dynamics of misinformation, digital platforms, and public trust in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem.

This issue showcases some of the best new research on how people engage with, resist, or reinforce misinformation in today’s digital environments.

The special issue grew out of the inaugural Communication Horizons Conference, an annual event hosted by the department and organized by Drs. Huskey, Hether, and Kim. The 2024 conference brought together national and international scholars to address the challenges of promoting information integrity in the face of algorithmic curation, political polarization, and rapid technological change.

“This issue showcases some of the best new research on how people engage with, resist, or reinforce misinformation in today’s digital environments,” said Dr. Huskey. “It also reflects our department’s commitment to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on media, cognition, and society.”

The articles in the issue span a wide range of topics, including:

  • The influence of online opinion climates on self-censorship and political expression
  • Perceptions of credibility and sharing behavior across fact-checking sources
  • The role of artificial intelligence in mitigating misinformation
  • How trait-level negativity bias interacts with algorithmic news curation
  • Moral framing and the spread of misleading content in social networks

In total, the special issue offers a rigorous, empirical examination of how structural and psychological forces intersect to shape information integrity in a digital world.

The full issue is available online through Journal of Media Psychology (Volume 37, Issue 5).