Summer is a strange season for the news. The pace slows down, but the world doesn’t. If you’re the kind of person who scrolls past a headline and pauses—wondering whether the story is true, who made it, and why it’s appearing at all—then this list is for you. The partners of the Mediterranean Digital Media Observatory (MedDMO), a network of researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers dedicated to understanding disinformation, have put together a collection of recommendations for anyone who wants to spend part of the summer going deeper into the forces shaping our public conversations. The list covers unexpected corners: the business models behind bad information, the psychology of sharing, the slow disappearance of shared facts, and the rise of AI chatbots as news sources. It includes books, research reports, podcasts, articles, and even online learning modules. None of these are homework. They are entry points. The goal is not to become an expert overnight, but to feel a little more solid in a world that keeps trying to make us guess. We are all swimming in the information environment now, whether we call it that or not. It’s the group chat, the news app, the YouTube recommendation, the tweet your cousin forwarded even though both of you know he knows better. To understand how this ecosystem works—what gets amplified, what gets buried, who profits, and who gets hurt—is a quiet superpower. This summer, instead of simply refreshing your feed, you might want to understand why the feed is refreshing you. The resources below don’t demand a journalism degree or a statistics textbook. They’re written and produced with real people in mind: people who are tired, skeptical, curious, sometimes confused, and still determined to figure out what’s true. Start wherever feels comfortable. Explore a report, listen to a podcast while walking, or curl up with a book that explains why your uncle believes the internet. The only rule is that you come out the other side seeing things a little more clearly.
At the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), the researchers have been watching how our relationship with news is changing, and their first recommendation is a report that tracks those changes in real time: the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026. This report is based on surveys of thousands of people across dozens of countries, asking not just what they read, but how they read, where they scroll, and who they trust. In recent years, the report has documented a profound shift: more people are getting news from social media, from video platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and increasingly from AI chatbots that summarize and answer questions as if they were human. You’ve probably felt this shift, even if you haven’t named it. Maybe you heard about a big story from a friend’s story, or you asked an AI app to explain a complicated political fight, and it gave you an answer so clean it made you suspicious. The report helps explain what all of this means. For example, it asks who now decides what is important: editors at a newspaper, or an algorithm that just wants you to keep watching? It also looks at trust—specifically, why some people trust the news less than ever, and what kinds of outlets are managing to hold onto their audiences. The report is packed with charts and data, but it’s surprisingly readable. It will make you feel like you have a map of a landscape you thought you knew. For anyone who has ever wondered why the news feels so chaotic and repetitive, this report offers a calm, evidence-based explanation. It doesn’t tell you what to think; it tells you what is happening. And in a summer when you might have time to read a long report on a porch or a park bench, that’s a rare luxury. Think of it as a check-up for the public conversation.
The second recommendation from CERTH is neither a report nor a podcast, but a true book: Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine. If you’ve ever stared at your phone after reading a particularly outrageous post and asked yourself, “Why am I feeling so angry right now?”—this book is the answer. Fisher, a journalist who spent years covering the intersection of technology and global politics, shows with unsettling clarity how social media platforms were not just passive hosts of angry content. They actively engineered for outrage. The business model rewards content that moves people, especially in the fastest and most intense way possible. Fear, hate, and disgust are excellent ingredients for engagement. Algorithms soon learned that an extreme post performs better than a moderate one, and conspiracy theories travel farther than careful explanations. Fisher takes you through real-world consequences, from online mobs to political crises to real-world violence, and makes you understand that these are not random bugs in the system; they are features. Reading this book can be an emotional experience. It might make you want to throw your phone at the wall. But it also helps you forgive yourself, because it shows that the system was built to hook you. You are not weak; you are being fought over by immensely powerful machines. The value of the book is that it moves the blame from individuals to structures. It’s not that people became stupider or meaner. It’s that the spaces we gather in were designed to amplify the loudest and most divisive voices. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. And that’s a good thing. It means we can demand change, both from the platforms and from ourselves. In a culture where so much of what we see online is made to make us feel something fast, taking the time to understand the machinery behind the feed is a small act of rebellion. Before you share something outrage-inducing this summer, maybe pick up Fisher’s book first. It might not slow your finger, but it will make you think.
If The Chaos Machine is the emotional gut punch, then The Science of Fake News is the calm science guy. This is an academic paper by David Lazer and colleagues, published in Science, and it remains one of the most important explanations ever written about why false information spreads online—and what we can do about it. The word “paper” might make you imagine something dense and dry, but this one is surprisingly accessible, especially for people who have been trying to explain misinformation to their relatives for years. One of its central findings is that false news travels faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, often because it is more novel and more surprising. A lie doesn’t just trip and fall; it has a built-in turbo engine. The paper also stresses that we shouldn’t individualize the problem. It’s not just a matter of “dumb people believing bad things” or “education will fix everything.” Instead, it looks at the whole ecosystem: the way platforms reward engagement, the way news media sometimes amplifies lies by reporting on them, the way human psychology’s natural biases make certain stories irresistible. There are no easy villains, and there are also no magic solutions. But the authors are not fatalistic. They suggest practical steps: improving media literacy in schools, redesigning platforms to reduce incentives for misinformation, giving independent fact-checkers more resources, and encouraging platforms to label or demote suspicious content. This paper is a great companion to Fisher’s book because it deals with the same problem from a different angle. Fisher gives you the story; Lazer gives you the framework. Reading them together is like seeing a forest from above and then walking through it on the ground. This summer, when you encounter a particularly confident lie online, you’ll be able to pause and think: “I know why this is here, I know how it works, and I know what would help.” That kind of knowledge is rare and valuable.
Not all exploration needs to happen between two covers. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) recommends turning on the BBC World Service podcast The Fifth Floor. The show takes its name from the BBC’s headquarters floor where the many language services—the teams that broadcast in Arabic, Swahili, Bengali, Hindi, Somali, and dozens of other languages—share the stories they are telling to audiences around the world. This is a genius concept, because these teams find stories you will simply never hear on mainstream English-language media. The Fifth Floor brings those stories to a global listener with warmth, curiosity, and depth. For anyone tired of the same anglophone news cycles, it’s a window into how the rest of the world sees things. The episode recommended specifically is called The Disinformation Wars, and it is a perfect place to start. In that episode, journalists from different parts of the BBC’s language services compare notes on how false information operates in their regions. You’ll hear how a piece of viral misinformation in one country can be adapted and weaponized in another. You’ll hear from journalists who have tracked down the people who create and spread lies, sometimes putting themselves in danger to do so. But the episode never feels like a lecture. It’s full of voices, real details, and the kind of storytelling that makes you want to keep your earbuds in just to hear what happens next. Listening to The Fifth Floor feels like sitting in a room with the world’s best-informed and most thoughtful friends. It humanizes the abstract concept of “disinformation” into specific, human experiences: a rumor that started in a marketplace, a doctored video that changed a local election, a social media campaign that turned neighbors against each other. Podcasts like this are ideal for summer—you can listen while walking, cooking, gardening, or sitting on a train that is definitely not delayed. The combination of global perspective and long-form reporting is exactly what our anxious, fragmented media diet doesn’t give us enough of.
Taken together, these recommendations form a kind of summer course in how to be a human in the modern information world. There’s a news report to help you understand the landscape, a powerful book to make you feel the problem in your bones, a rigorous academic paper to give you tools for reasoning, and a podcast to remind you that this fight is happening everywhere, in every language, right now. They all share a common assumption: that ordinary people are not just passive victims of misinformation. We can learn, we can ask questions, and we can demand better from the platforms and institutions that shape what we see. The point is not to become a cynical person who trusts nothing. The point is to become a discerning person who trusts wisely. This summer, you might not have time to solve every problem in the world. But you can understand a little more about why the world feels the way it does. Maybe you’ll read Max Fisher on a beach and spend the evening looking at your phone with a mix of horror and compassion. Maybe you’ll read the Lazer paper in a coffee shop and then discuss it with your friends. Maybe you’ll listen to The Fifth Floor and suddenly realize that misinformation is not only a “Western” issue, and that fact-checkers from Karachi to Nairobi to Rio are dealing with the same forces. The more you learn, the less overwhelming the media environment becomes. It starts to have shapes and patterns and causes. You begin to spot the emotional triggers, the outrage bait, and the quiet, genuine journalism that is still all around us. That awareness is a form of resilience. And this summer, while the world keeps spinning at its usual dizzy speed, you will be the person who asks, “Wait, where did that source come from?”—and you’ll be comfortable sitting with the question until you find an answer. That is what MedDMO and its partners are really offering: a companion for your curiosity. Not a lecture, not a guilt trip, but a set of keys for opening doors you might not have noticed. So go ahead. Pick one. Open it. See what changes.