MediaWell, the Social Science Research Council's new web platform for Disinformation Scholarship

By Samuel Spies, Program Officer, Media & Democracy, Social Science Research Council and Adriana DiSilvestro, Program Assistant, MediaWell.

In the last few years, a huge amount of scholarship has emerged on disinformation and related topics, such as toxicity, polarization, populist rhetoric, and election interference. Researchers in disciplines from anthropology to psychology are working on disinformation-related questions, often with different taxonomies. This volume makes it hard for researchers to stay abreast of other disciplines. Seemingly contradictory findings present challenges for journalists, citizens, and policymakers seeking clear answers.  

MediaWell, the Social Science Research Council’s new web platform, is a response to this volume and spread – our aim was to create a one-stop platform that is freely accessible for researchers, policymakers, journalists, funders, and interested citizens alike. We’re excited to make the project available, and eager for feedback on this new format for curating research and promoting public scholarship.

Screenshot of MediaWell

Content Types

MediaWell hosts several different kinds of content, including original research reviews and op-eds by a panel of experts. Currently, we have two new opinion pieces: Yochai Benkler argues for a reconsideration of the underlying drivers of our epistemic crisis, while Sarah Sobieraj describes the threats to democracy posed by identity-based attacks online. Coming soon, David Karpf’s contribution discusses the role of political elites, the eroding myth of the attentive public, and the true threat of disinformation. 

The remainder of our content we curate and aggregate from scholarly sources, journalistic outlets, and an ever-growing body of gray literature—white papers, reports, and so on. In addition to this range of news and analysis, we also feature calls for papers, job openings, events, and other content related to our twelve research subtopics.

Each of these types of content contributes to the site’s main goal, which is to allow audiences to easily access up-to-date information about the world of online mis- and disinformation from a variety of perspectives. Careful curation is essential to this mission. Our news feed is not designed to be comprehensive, but to highlight significant analysis and innovative publications. We don’t want to replicate the overwhelming mass of material that pops up when you search for these topics online. As the project develops, we ultimately are planning for a majority of our content to be nominated by editors-at-large from the public. (We encourage those interested in these topics to sign up on our “get involved” page.) On any given day our curated news feed might host long-form journalism, blog posts, and reports from peer institutions, regulatory documents, or news analysis.

For ease of use, we keep two types of nominated content separate from our general news feed. Events go in our calendar, and our collection of scholarly literature lives in our citations library.

Live research reviews

In the planning process for MediaWell, all of our external stakeholders asked for the SSRC’s help in distilling current research on disinformation and misinformation for a range of audience types, but they did not want academic literature reviews. With our “Live Research Reviews” we aim for succinct and understandable summaries of key subdomains of research. Rather than static reviews, we want them to be living documents that respond to developments in the field and changes in consensus as they happen. In an effort to address change over time, we have implemented a versioning system to ensure that older versions are archived, accessible and citable. We hope this versioning system can be a model for other online academic publication.

We also learned early that the initial goal of 2,000-word research reviews didn’t match up well with the complexity of the literature. Our research reviews have grown in length, and we’ve reduced our number of research topics in consultation with our advisory board, but we still aim to make them understandable and accessible for a wide range of readers.

PressForward and Zotero

The platform is built using open-source software, including WordPress, which powers much of the Council’s web infrastructure. MediaWell also relies heavily on PressForward, a WordPress plugin for aggregating scholarship and web content developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. PressForward powers the crowdsourcing elements of MediaWell. We had prior experience using PressForward for a previous project called the Media & Democracy Network (MDN), and it works quite well. Using open-source platforms also reflects our commitment to supporting accessible public scholarship.

Zotero (also developed by RRCHNM) is our primary tool for organizing our library of scholarly literature, which is quickly approaching 1,000 entries (many of us have used Zotero for years, and we are big fans). We are exploring ways to further integrate Zotero with MediaWell to help our curation process run more smoothly, including addressing consistency issues for ingesting citations. As much as we like Zotero, we also recognize its limits, and we invest a lot of labor in ensuring that our Zotero entries are reasonably accurate.

New Public Scholarship

MediaWell represents a new emphasis for the SSRC. Our recently unveiled Media, Technology, and Politics theme integrates several existing initiatives under one conceptual umbrella. This integration reflects the Council’s recognition that disinformation is part of a larger set of longstanding concerns surrounding the intersections of media and democracy, and that disinformation needs to be understood in relation to other social forces.

Lastly, MediaWell represents a new format for public scholarship, one that seeks to produce and curate content for multiple audiences. Our hope is that the emerging discipline of disinformation studies will coalesce around MediaWell and that the project will serve the public interest by bridging academic and general audiences and democratizing access to knowledge on these critical emerging issues.