It’s completely natural to feel a knot in your stomach when you see a viral post claiming that your vote doesn’t matter, that the system is rigged, or that election workers are secretly trying to steal the election. With Election Day less than a week away in the 2026 midterms, social media is flooded with videos, screenshots, and alarming captions that seem designed to make you distrust everything about the voting process. But here’s the thing: when you actually slow down and look at what these posts are claiming, the “scandal” almost always turns out to be a misunderstanding, a…

Here is a summary and humanized version of the report, written in six paragraphs: The coronavirus pandemic didn’t just create a public health emergency; it created an information emergency that made the health crisis worse. From the very beginning, social media became a battlefield where falsehoods, half-truths, and outright conspiracy theories spread faster than the virus itself. It helps to understand the difference between two related problems: disinformation is the deliberate creation and sharing of false or misleading information, while misinformation is the unintentional sharing of the same kind of content. Both are dangerous, but they feed on each other.…