Chapter 40 Exercises: Global and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Misinformation

Section A: Conceptual and Comparative Exercises

Exercise 1: WEIRD Bias Audit

Select any three influential empirical papers on misinformation published in a major journal (Nature Human Behaviour, Political Communication, Journal of Communication, or similar). For each paper, document: the country where the study was conducted, the language of the research instrument, the platform studied, the population sampled, and the conclusions drawn. Then assess: which of these conclusions are likely to generalize globally and which are likely to be context-specific? Write a 400-word critique of the papers' generalizability claims. (600–800 words total)

Exercise 2: Information Ecosystem Mapping

Select a country not extensively covered in this chapter (Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Colombia, or a country of your choice). Research and document the following dimensions of its information ecosystem: primary platforms for news consumption, internet and smartphone penetration rates, literacy rates and digital literacy levels, primary languages for online content, and documented cases of misinformation harm. Produce a 1-page ecosystem map and a 300-word assessment of the most significant misinformation vulnerabilities.

Exercise 3: WhatsApp as an Information Platform

Compare WhatsApp's information architecture with Twitter/X's on five dimensions relevant to misinformation: content visibility, forwarding velocity, content moderation capacity, verification of information origin, and audience targeting. Based on this comparison, explain why WhatsApp presents distinctive misinformation challenges that Twitter-focused research and policy does not address. (500–700 words)

Exercise 4: Cultural Dimension Analysis

Using Hofstede's cultural dimension scores for five countries of your choice (scores available at hofstede-insights.com), analyze: which dimension scores are most predictive of the misinformation vulnerabilities described in the chapter, whether the Hofstede dimensions map onto the country-specific patterns described in sections 40.3–40.7, and what alternative cultural frameworks might capture dimensions Hofstede misses. Be critical: identify two significant limitations of applying Hofstede's national-level scores to individual-level information behavior. (600–800 words)

Exercise 5: Fact-Checking Under Constraint

A journalist at a fact-checking organization in a country where critical coverage of the government carries criminal risk asks your advice: how should they navigate the tension between journalistic integrity and personal safety? Design a decision framework for fact-checking in high-risk environments that addresses: which claims to investigate and which to defer, how to publish findings safely, what institutional protections to seek, and when to publish through partner organizations outside the country. Draw on documented experiences from journalists in Mexico, Thailand, and the Philippines. (600–800 words)

Exercise 6: Colonial Media Legacy Analysis

Select a country with a colonial history and analyze: how colonial media institutions were structured and what role they played in colonial administration, what happened to those institutions at independence, how the colonial legacy shapes contemporary media trust, and what implications this has for fact-checking organizations in that country seeking to establish credibility. Your analysis should be historically grounded and cite specific examples. (700–900 words)

Exercise 7: Forwarding Limit Policy Analysis

WhatsApp's forwarding limit (restricting highly forwarded messages to one forward at a time) was the first major platform structural intervention targeting viral misinformation velocity. Research the evidence on its effectiveness. Then evaluate: what the intervention can and cannot achieve, how bad actors route around it, whether the intervention should be adopted as a global default or whether it was appropriately targeted to India's specific context, and what additional structural interventions WhatsApp could implement to reduce misinformation spread. (600–800 words)

Exercise 8: Pre-bunking for Cross-Cultural Audiences

The pre-bunking (inoculation) approach — exposing audiences to weakened forms of misinformation before they encounter it — has been extensively tested in Western contexts. Design a pre-bunking intervention for a non-Western audience of your choice, addressing: the specific misinformation narratives to target, the cultural adaptations needed (format, language, authority framing, distribution channel), how you would evaluate effectiveness, and what you would need to know about the cultural context that Western inoculation research does not tell you.

Exercise 9: Multilingual Fact-Checking Resource Allocation

India's AltNews fact-checks in six languages. AltNews has limited resources — a small staff and a modest budget. Design a resource allocation strategy for a fact-checking organization that must cover misinformation in 20 languages with resources sufficient for 5 full-time linguist-journalists. Your strategy should specify: how to prioritize languages, what automated assistance is available and its limitations, how to build volunteer networks for lower-priority languages, and how to handle content in languages where no staff are available.

Exercise 10: Baltic Resilience Model

The Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — have invested in media literacy as a national security priority, embedding it in school curricula and integrating it with digital governance and defense planning. Analyze this model: what makes the Baltic approach distinctive from Western media literacy programs, what specific Russian disinformation threats has it targeted, what evidence exists for its effectiveness, and what elements of the Baltic model might be exportable to other countries facing state-sponsored disinformation. What conditions made the Baltic model possible that may not exist elsewhere? (700–900 words)

Section B: Case-Specific Analyses

Exercise 11: India IT Cell Analysis

Research the documented operations of the BJP IT Cell based on journalistic investigations (Snigdha Puri's A Disturbing Anatomy of Hate; coverage from The Wire, The Quint, and international media). Document: the organizational structure as publicly known, the content strategies (types of content, platforms used), the documented examples of false content produced, and the response of platforms to IT Cell-linked networks. Then assess: what distinguishes the IT Cell from legitimate political communication, and how should platforms and regulators draw that distinction? (700–900 words)

Exercise 12: Brazilian WhatsApp Election Ecosystem

Research the 2022 Brazilian presidential election WhatsApp disinformation ecosystem. Document: the major false narratives circulating via WhatsApp, the evidence for coordinated distribution vs. organic spread, the role of group administrators, the Brazilian electoral court's (TSE) response, and the comparison to the 2018 election. What changed in platform response and government response between 2018 and 2022? What did not change? (600–800 words)

Exercise 13: EUvsDisinfo Case Analysis

Visit the EUvsDisinfo database (euvsdisinfo.eu) and select five documented Russian disinformation cases from different years and targeting different audiences. For each case: identify the false narrative, the distribution channels used, the languages in which it was distributed, the claimed legitimate facts distorted to construct the narrative, and the apparent strategic purpose. Then identify: what common narrative templates appear across multiple cases, and what this reveals about the strategic logic of Russian information operations.

Exercise 14: Singapore POFMA Assessment

Research the specific applications of Singapore's POFMA since its enactment in 2019. Document at least five cases where POFMA orders were issued, including: the content targeted, the ministry that issued the order, the platform to which the order was directed, and the outcome. Then assess: how many cases involved content that appears genuinely false by independent verification, how many involve content that is disputed or ambiguous, and how many appear to target legitimate political opposition or journalistic content. What does your analysis suggest about POFMA's actual operation vs. its stated purpose?

Exercise 15: Philippines Keyboard Army and Algorithmic Amplification

Based on Rappler's documented research on Philippine social media operations and Maria Ressa's accounts, explain the mechanism by which a relatively small keyboard army could achieve outsized impact through platform algorithmic amplification. Identify: the specific Facebook features that were exploited, the evidence that coordinated inauthentic behavior rather than organic engagement explains the reach, the platform responses (if any), and the broader lessons for how organized online influence operations exploit platform architecture.

Section C: Technical and Methodological Exercises

Exercise 16: Low-Resource Language NLP Audit

Select a low-resource language spoken by a population with documented misinformation vulnerability (Yoruba, Amharic, Swahili, Tagalog, or Bengali). Research: what NLP resources exist for this language (labeled corpora, pre-trained models, POS taggers), what tasks can be performed with current tools and at what accuracy, what is missing compared to English NLP tools, and what research efforts are underway to close the gap. Write a 400-word assessment of the state of NLP for this language relevant to misinformation detection. (600–800 words total)

Exercise 17: Code-Switching Corpus Analysis

Collect (or use a provided synthetic dataset of) 20 social media posts in a code-switching language variety (Taglish, Hinglish, Franglais, etc.). For each post: identify which segments are in which language, classify the type of code-switching (intra-sentential, inter-sentential, tag-switching), and explain what challenges this would pose for a monolingual language classifier. Then propose: what approach a multilingual NLP system would need to take to handle code-switching content accurately.

Exercise 18: Cross-Cultural Trust Survey Design

Design a survey instrument that could measure (1) institutional trust in media, government, and fact-checkers, and (2) susceptibility to misinformation, across at least three culturally distinct populations. Your design should address: how to ensure survey equivalence across languages and cultural contexts, how to avoid social desirability bias, what response format adaptations are needed for populations with different literacy levels, and how you would validate that your constructs are being measured equivalently across populations.

Exercise 19: Oral Misinformation Verification Protocol

Develop a protocol for fact-checking misinformation that circulates primarily in oral/audio form (WhatsApp voice notes, radio broadcasts, spoken community rumors). Your protocol should specify: how to collect and archive audio content, what transcription methods are available at scale, how to verify claims that were never written down, how to distribute corrections through audio channels, and what verification can and cannot achieve in an oral information environment.

Exercise 20: Africa Check Methodology Analysis

Research Africa Check's published fact-checking methodology guides. Identify: what specific adaptations Africa Check has made to standard Western fact-checking methodology for African contexts, what data sources it uses that are Africa-specific, how it handles content in multiple African languages, and what its documented impact metrics look like. Then identify one gap in Africa Check's current methodology and propose an enhancement. (500–700 words)

Section D: Design and Policy Exercises

Exercise 21: Global South Media Literacy Curriculum

Design a one-week media literacy module for secondary school students in a specific African or South Asian country (specify which). Your design should: be adapted to the specific information ecosystem of that country (primary platforms, languages, literacy levels, dominant misinformation types), use formats accessible with low-bandwidth mobile internet, incorporate community and social network dimensions alongside individual critical thinking, and include an assessment mechanism suited to the educational context.

Exercise 22: IPID Strengthening

The International Partnership on Information and Democracy is voluntary and lacks enforcement mechanisms. Design a reformed international information integrity framework that: retains the political feasibility of getting significant countries to join, adds meaningful accountability without crossing into censorship, addresses state-sponsored disinformation from non-member states, and creates incentives for platform compliance. Identify the political obstacles to your proposal and how they might be addressed.

Exercise 23: Platform Responsibility in the Global South

Meta (WhatsApp's owner) is aware that WhatsApp is used as the primary platform for election misinformation in India, Brazil, and many other countries. What obligations does Meta have regarding misinformation on WhatsApp in these contexts? Design a policy framework for platform responsibility in the Global South that addresses: language coverage for content moderation, minimum fact-checking partnerships per country, encrypted messaging exemptions and limits, and local authority engagement protocols.

Exercise 24: Diaspora Community Information Ecosystem

Russian-speaking diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America are targeted by Russian state-affiliated disinformation through Russian-language media. Select a specific diaspora community and research: its primary information sources, the Russian-language disinformation narratives targeting it, how the host country's fact-checkers and media have responded, and what the diaspora community's own information literacy organizations have developed. Propose a specific intervention to improve information resilience in this community that respects its cultural and linguistic identity. (700–900 words)

Exercise 25: Cross-Border Fact-Checking Network Design

The Latam Chequea network coordinates fact-checkers across 20+ Latin American countries. Design an analogous network for West Africa, addressing: which organizations would be members, what shared infrastructure would be needed, how content would be translated across English, French, Portuguese, and major African languages, what the governance and funding structure would be, and how the network would handle politically sensitive fact-checks in countries with government hostility to fact-checking.

Exercise 26: Context-Sensitive Credibility Heuristics

Standard media literacy education teaches "SIFT" (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims). Adapt the SIFT method for a context where: (a) the primary information format is WhatsApp audio clips, (b) the majority of the audience has limited formal literacy, (c) institutional sources are widely distrusted, and (d) the primary decision about credibility is social and collective rather than individual. What changes to the SIFT framework are needed, and what new heuristics should be added?

Exercise 27: Narco-Misinformation Ethics

Fact-checkers working in Mexico on security content related to cartel activity face personal risk — several journalists have been killed in connection with security reporting. Design an ethical framework for fact-checking organizations operating in high-risk environments: what content should they investigate, what safety protocols should be required, when is it appropriate to publish through partner organizations in safer countries, and what institutional responsibilities do international fact-checking networks have for the safety of their members in dangerous contexts?

Exercise 28: Comparing Election Misinformation Responses

Compare the electoral misinformation response mechanisms of three countries: India (2024 General Election), Nigeria (2023 Presidential Election), and Brazil (2022 Presidential Election). For each, document: the primary misinformation types circulating, the fact-checking organizations active, the platform policies applied, the government or electoral commission responses, and any documented impact. Then assess: which response mechanisms were most effective and why?

Exercise 29: WhatsApp Group Administrator Responsibility

In many Global South contexts, WhatsApp group administrators (admins) are informal community gatekeepers who choose which content to allow in groups and whether to forward messages. Analyze the role of group admins as potential fact-checking intermediaries: what training or resources would make them effective misinformation filters, what social pressures work against their playing this role, how you would identify and equip admin networks in a specific country context, and what evidence-based programs have attempted to use community gatekeepers for misinformation mitigation.

Exercise 30: Research Gap Analysis and Agenda

Based on this chapter's discussion of the WEIRD bias in misinformation research, write a structured research agenda (800–1,000 words) identifying: (1) the three most important unanswered empirical questions about misinformation in the Global South, (2) the methodological innovations needed to answer them given language diversity, platform diversity, and ethical constraints, (3) the institutional partnerships between Western universities and Global South research institutions that would be needed, and (4) the funding mechanisms appropriate to support this research agenda.