Michael Geers

• Dr. rer. nat.
• Assistant Professor of Marketing at University College Dublin

The growing use of social media field experiments demands a rethink of current research ethics in computational social science and psychological research. Here, we provide an exploratory empirical account of key user concerns and outline a number of critical discussions that need to take place to protect participants and help researchers to make us...

Political misinformation poses a major threat to democracies worldwide, often inciting intense disputes between opposing political groups. Despite its central role for informed electorates and political decision making, little is known about how aware people are of whether they are right or wrong when distinguishing accurate political information f...

What motivates people to share and create content online? In real time, we linked each of N=2,762 individual posts (retweets and newly created content) with the self-reported motives from a sample of N=137 highly active US Twitter users over the course of one week. We also captured their total activity of N=48,419 posts over 10 weeks (March-May 202...

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of fals...

The growing use of social media field experiments demands a rethink of current research ethics in computational social science. Here, we provide an empirical account of key user concerns and outline a number of critical discussions that need to take place to protect participants and help researchers to make use of the novel opportunities of digital...

Research on online misinformation has evolved rapidly, but organizing its results and identifying open research questions is difficult without a systematic approach. We present the Online Misinformation Engagement Framework, which classifies people’s engagement with online misinformation into four stages: selecting information sources, choosing wha...

Political misinformation poses a major threat to democracies worldwide, often inciting intense disputes between opposing political groups. Despite its central role for informed electorates and political decision making, little is known about how aware people are of whether they are right or wrong when distinguishing accurate political information f...

Many parts of our social lives are speeding up, a process known as social acceleration. How social acceleration impacts people’s ability to judge the veracity of online news, and ultimately the spread of misinformation, is largely unknown. We examined the effects of accelerated online dynamics, operationalised as time pressure, on online misinforma...

Evidence is accumulating that parts of our social lives are speeding up, a phenomenon known as social acceleration. The implications of social acceleration for people's ability to judge the veracity of online content, and ultimately for the spread of misinformation, are largely unclear. We examined the effects of accelerated online dynamics, operat...

Misinformation presents a significant societal problem. To measure individuals’ susceptibility to misinformation and study its predictors, researchers have used a broad variety of ad-hoc item sets, scales, question framings, and response modes. Because of this variety, it remains unknown whether results from different studies can be compared (e.g.,...

Online platforms’ data give advertisers the ability to “microtarget” recipients’ personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate. One possible response is to raise awareness for and resilience against such manipulative strategies through psychological inoculation. Two online expe...

Online platforms collect and infer detailed information about people and their behaviour, giving advertisers an unprecedented ability to reach specific groups of recipients. This ability to "microtarget" messages contrasts with people's limited knowledge of what data platforms hold and how those data are used. Two online experiments (total N = 828...