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Health‐related misinformation, especially in times of a global health crisis, can have severe negative consequences on public health. In the current studies, we investigated the persuasive impact of COVID‐19‐related misinformation, and whether the valence of the misinformation and recipients' degree of overconfidence affect this impact. In two pre‐registered experimental studies, participants ( N = 403; N = 437) were exposed to either a positive or a negative news article describing a fictional hospital's high COVID‐19 recovery/mortality rates. Half of the participants subsequently received a correction. Attitudes towards the hospital were measured before and after exposure. Results of both studies showed that, as expected, corrections reduced the persuasive impact of misinformation. But whereas some persuasive impact remained for corrected negative misinformation (a continued influence effect), it reversed for corrected positive information, causing people to have more negative attitudes towards the hospital than before exposure to any information (a backfire effect). These results corroborate prior suggestions that continued influence effects are asymmetric: negative misinformation is harder to neutralise than positive misinformation. Participants' overconfidence degrees did not have a moderating role in misinformation effects. Even though corrections decrease the persuasive impact of health‐related misinformation, continued influence remains for negative misinformation.

On a daily basis, individuals between 12 and 25 years of age engage with their mobile devices for many hours. Social Media Use (SMU) has important implications for the social life of younger individuals in particular. However, measuring SMU and its effects often poses challenges to researchers. In this exploratory study, we focus on some of these challenges, by addressing how plurality in the measurement and age-specific characteristics of SMU can influence its relationship with measures of subjective mental health (MH). We conducted a survey among a nationally representative sample of Dutch adolescents and young adults ( N = 3,669). Using these data, we show that measures of SMU show little similarity with each other, and that age-group differences underlie SMU. Similar to the small associations previously shown in social media-effects research, we also find some evidence that greater SMU associates to drops and to increases in MH. Albeit nuanced, associations between SMU and MH were found to be characterized by both linear and quadratic functions. These findings bear implications for the level of association between different measures of SMU and its theorized relationship with other dependent variables of interest in media-effects research.

Journalists and experts contribute to the creation of frames (frame-building) of innovations. However, little is known about the specific contribution of these different societal actors to the frame-building of emerging information technologies. This article focuses on a specific emerging information technology – cyberinfrastructure for big data. In particular, we investigated the role of metaphors in the frame-building of cyberinfrastructure during its early development, and contrast the metaphorical framing of cyberinfrastructure by journalists in a corpus of US news texts (Study 1) with the metaphorical framing of experts in a corpus of interviews (Study 2). Results show considerable differences between the frames by journalists and experts in the frame-building process. Journalists, to a great extent, employ their own frames in conceptualizing cyberinfrastructure rather than drawing on the frames used by experts. Future research should investigate the impact of these different metaphorical frames on audience members.