With my colleague Bart Cammaerts, I am currently working on a project on Visual Misinformation. This project is funded by the LSE’s urgent grants award, based on the pressing challenge visual misinformation poses to democratic institutions, including items produced by AI and so-called “deep fakes”.
During 2024, we gathered data to compare the electoral visual disinformation environment across 4 countries: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. We set up dummy social media accounts for each country and followed popular and influential accounts on either the political left or right. We then harvested examples of visual misinformation that appeared on the feed of our dummy accounts.
Earlier relevant work
- Anstead, N. 2021. What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Fake News? Sage, London.
- Anstead, N, Edwards, L, Livingstone, S and Stoilova, M. 2025. The Potential for Media Literacy to Combat Misinformation: Results of a Rapid Evidence Assessment. International Journal of Communication. 19. Available here.
Project outputs
- Anstead, N and Cammaerts, B. 2025. Visual Misinformation and Election Campaigns: A Four Country Comparison. Department of Media and Communication, London School of Economics Working Paper (Download here).
- Anstead, N and Cammaerts, B. 2025. Seeing is Believing: Visual Misinformation at Election Time. Presentation to the Department of Media and Communication Research Dialogues. London School of Economics (download PDF of slides here).
- Anstead, N and Cammaerts, B. 2025. The Challenges of Studying Visual Misinformation During Election Campaigns. Post on Media@LSE blog (available here).
- Anstead, N and Cammaerts, B. (2025). Seeing is Believing? The Dangers of Visual Misinformation go Beyond its Credibility. Post on Media@LSE blog (available here).