Melisa is a Gates scholar and received an MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology (Distinction) from Cambridge. We caught up with Melisa a few weeks ago to talk about a theory that suggests we might be able to inoculate people against misinformation the same way we inoculate them against disease.

Originally from Germany, Melisa has a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Psychology from Aberystwyth University. With a focus on complex societal and political decisions, she’s interested in the formation, polarisation, and ‘immunisation’ of attitudes where the spread of misinformation poses a threat to science & society.

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Footnotes
  1. Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
  2. The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
  3. This method used Twitter’s historical search API
  4. The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
  5. All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
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Published on
January 14, 2021
April 20, 2022