Acknowledgments

A textbook about misinformation depends entirely on the vast community of researchers, journalists, fact-checkers, and educators who have built the evidence base it synthesizes. We are deeply grateful to all of them.

We owe particular intellectual debts to the researchers whose work appears throughout these pages: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky for their foundational work on cognitive biases; Elizabeth Loftus for her decades of research on memory and the misinformation effect; Sander van der Linden and his colleagues for developing inoculation theory into a practical tool for the digital age; Kate Starbird, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and the scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center for their rigorous empirical work on political misinformation; Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group for their groundbreaking research on how people actually evaluate online information; Renée DiResta, Alex Stamos, and the Stanford Internet Observatory for their documentation of information operations; and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway for "Merchants of Doubt," which remains the definitive account of how scientific consensus gets manufactured away.

The global fact-checking community — the International Fact-Checking Network and its member organizations including PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Full Fact, Africa Check, AltNews, and hundreds more — do the unglamorous, essential work of checking one claim at a time against available evidence. Their methodology and integrity are an inspiration.

We are grateful to the open-source Python community whose tools make the computational chapters possible: the developers of scikit-learn, transformers (Hugging Face), NetworkX, pandas, matplotlib, NLTK, spaCy, and the dozens of other libraries that students in this course will learn to use.

Several colleagues read draft chapters and provided invaluable feedback, saving us from numerous errors and infelicities. The errors that remain are entirely our own.

We thank the editorial team at Open Academic Press for their patience, their commitment to open access, and their recognition that the problem this textbook addresses is urgent enough to warrant making it freely available.

Finally, we are grateful to our students — the ones who asked the hard questions, challenged our framings, and reminded us why this work matters. This book exists because of them.

The Authors 2024