Matthew Facciani

It’s complementary, there’s no single magic bullet against misinformation which is a complex, interconnected problem requiring multi-pronged solutions. We need better mindsets, critical thinking and BS detection, media literacy and more

Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error

“Friday's layoffs swept up scientists involved in responding to disease outbreaks and running an influential journal. Officials said the mistaken dismissals were being rescinded.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/h...

M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment

“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone."
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

I Sat Next To An Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theorist On A Plane. Then I Told Him What I Do For A Living. "As someone who recently completed 15 years of training to become an infectious diseases physician-scientist, I can’t avoid these conversations."

“With COVID, vaccines, Lyme disease, any of it — I’m not your enemy,” I told my seatmate as we were getting ready to disembark. “And I know you’re not the enemy, either.”
“True,” he agreed. “But they always want to make someone your enemy.”
www.huffpost.com/entry/infect...

People can directly experience higher electricity costs, pollution, and water shortages from these AI data centers while the benefits of AI are still quite abstract and speculative.
www.jsonline.com/story/commun...

How to Train Yourself to Be More Open-Minded and Less Easily Misled New research shows that cultivating open-minded thinking can be taught, and that this simple shift improves our ability to tell facts from falsehoods.

Can we actually train ourselves to be more open-minded and harder to fool?

New research says yes. A short message warning us about closed-mindedness made people better at spotting misinformation, less likely to believe conspiracy theories, and more thoughtful about what they shared #MisinfoResearch

Media literacy games can be very effective in teaching important skills, and this new game uses an AI chatbot to add an extra layer of interactivity and engagement.
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... #MisinfoResearch

Why Feeling Like a Victim Makes You Susceptible to Conspiracy Theories Our research reveals that a tendency to feel personally wronged makes people more vulnerable to conspiracy beliefs.

This is related to some of my research that found how feeling personally wronged makes people more vulnerable to conspiracy beliefs.
matthewfacciani.substack.com/p/why-feelin...

The ‘sour grapes’ of conspiracy theories: how does the emotion of ressentiment predict conspiracy beliefs? - Acta Politica This research examines how negative emotions affect the degree to which people endorse conspiracy theories. Conspiracy beliefs typically flourish in contemporary politics that evoke negative emotions. In the present article, we hypothesized that citizens in ressentiment, a particular emotional state salient in contemporary grievance politics, is a key underpinning of why people believe in conspiracy theories. Ressentiment is a multi-layered emotion, within which perceptions of unfairness, bitterness, and feelings of (suppressed) anger are central. Across three studies, we examined the role of ressentiment in predicting belief in conspiracy theories. Study 1 (United Kingdom, N = 300) and Study 2 (United States, N = 300) revealed a positive relationship between ressentiment, measured through a validated scale, and belief in conspiracy theories. This relationship was mediated by rejection of the status quo. In Study 3 (United States, N = 300, pre-registered), we used a vignette describing a fictitious country to experimentally show that evoking ressentiment (vs. control condition) significantly increased belief in conspiracy theories. Taken together, these findings reveal that ressentiment is central for understanding the emotional roots of believing in conspiracy theories.

New research found that belief in conspiracy theories is linked to a mix of perceived unfairness, bitterness, and suppressed anger. People who experience these feelings are more likely to reject the status quo and embrace conspiratorial explanations.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Community fact-checking on X survived Elon Musk. It may not survive AI. A new working paper looks at the durability of Community Notes

A new study finds that participation in Community Notes on X is declining, with fewer contributors sticking around and fewer notes being published. The rise of AI-generated notes may worsen these trends by overwhelming the system and reducing incentives.
indicator.media/p/community-...

Public Health Is Outgunned: A Conversation w Science Communicators Katelyn Jetelina and Jessica Steier Podcast Episode · Why Should I Trust You? · 10/09/2025 · 1h 15m

Highly recommend this conversation with two of today’s leading science communicators, who offer their insights on both the challenges and opportunities facing science & health communication.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Annual COVID Vaccines Save Lives, New Study Shows A new study shows that receiving an updated COVID vaccine reduced people’s risk of severe disease and death in all age groups, regardless of immunity from prior infection or vaccination

“A new study shows that receiving an updated COVID vaccine reduced people’s risk of severe disease and death in all age groups, regardless of immunity from prior infection or vaccination”
www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-...

KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Tylenol-Autism Link and Vaccine Policies | KFF Following the Trump administration’s warning last month that using acetaminophen – the active ingredient in Tylenol – during pregnancy can increase the risk of autism in children, very few adults say ...

“Overall, just 4% of adults say it is “definitely true” that taking Tylenol during pregnancy increases the risk of the child developing autism, while a much larger share (35%) say the claim is “definitely false.”
www.kff.org/public-opini...

Grandma Knows Best: The Generation That Survived Polio Has Something to Say About Vaccines 67 million grandparents remember what we’ve been lucky enough to forget

“And that’s what makes this movement so smart. Grandparents have the lived experience. Grandchildren still have the capacity to listen. Together, they cut through the noise.”
open.substack.com/pub/theunbia...

“the Trump administration will launch a program next year to find out how much money an artificial intelligence algorithm could save the federal government by denying care to Medicare patients”
kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Excited to speak at the RISE AI conference at The University of Notre Dame! Here is Sriram Raghavan, Vice President of IBM Research for Al speaking about GenAI apps. Later I’ll be talking about how AI impacts our information ecosystem.

Thank you so much! I hope you enjoy it :)

Pediatricians express frustrations over delay in COVID vaccines for children in federal program Millions of children are unable to access COVID-19 vaccines through the Vaccines for Children program because federal health officials have not finalized recommendations on who should get vaccinated.

“Millions of children are unable to access COVID-19 vaccines through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program because federal health officials have not finalized recommendations on who should get vaccinated.”
publications.aap.org/aapnews/news...

“Through a critical review of the current literature, we demonstrate that (a) the prevalence of misinformation is nonnegligible if reasonably inclusive definitions are applied and that (b) misinformation has causal impacts on important beliefs and behaviors”
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

The complexity of misinformation extends beyond virus and warfare analogies - npj Complexity npj Complexity - The complexity of misinformation extends beyond virus and warfare analogies

Here is a cool paper that dives into the complexity of measuring the spread of misinformation
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This was exactly what I was worried that could happen, and this new study (although not peer-reviewed yet) confirms what I would have predicted.

New study finds that overly agreeable & validating AI chatbots make people more extreme in their beliefs. They essentially function as your own personalized echo chamber.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Opinion | What 20 Years of Listening to Vaccine-Hesitant Parents Has Taught Me

“research suggests that this approach to vaccines is entirely logical in a culture that insists that health is the result of hard work and informed consumer decisions and too often sees illness as a personal failure.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...

Weird, Fantastic, and Fringe: Undergraduate Courses Designed to Teach Critical Thinking Through Refutation Critical thinking is widely accepted as a goal of higher education. However, students are graduating from college with a multitude of false beliefs indicating current strategies are inadequate. We ...

A review of 58 college syllabi that focus on critical thinking showed that these courses often focus on pseudoscience, paranormal claims, and conspiracy theories, relying heavily on active learning methods to help students learn how to separate science from pseudoscience and make better decisions.

Group of Informed Voices Inc.

I’m excited to be speaking with the Group of Informed Voices in NYC this November! They host free public lectures (with meals!) to make education accessible, foster community, and bring people together across differences.

If you’d like to support their mission, consider donating here:

This paper describes a fun media literacy classroom activity where students form groups to create and present media literacy solutions, each secretly weaving in either facts, emotional appeals, or misinformation, while a panel of peers judges their work.
www.proquest.com/docview/3251...

Thank you so much Laura! Great to connect on here and I'm looking forward to speaking with your group! :)

NEW: Share of *all* US adults who regularly get news on each site
2% Bluesky
2% Truth Social
3% Threads

6% Nextdoor
9% Reddit
12% X

20% TikTok
35% YouTube
38% Facebook

TikTok supplies news to about 10x more American adults than Bluesky does!

Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows Brain imaging is illuminating the patterns linked to productive, positive dialogue, and those insights could help people connect with others

“allowing ourselves to traverse a range of ideas and to learn from other people’s experiences, may be both more enjoyable and productive.”
www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

Many Parents Express Doubt Over Childhood Vaccine Recommendations and Safety, Including Larger Shares of Younger Parents and Republican Parents

When I say that being anti-vaccine is a political identity now I mean literally. Look at the divide between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans.

During COVID the Virality Project documented the extent to which political influencers who’d never commented on 💉 before got deep into the topic on all shots.