Today's fragmented and digital media environment may create a fertile breeding ground for the uncontrolled spread of disinformation. Although previous research has investigated the effects of misinformation and corrective efforts, we know too little about the role of visuals in disinformation and fact checking. Against this backdrop, we conducted an online experiment with a diverse sample of U.S. citizens (N = 1,404) to investigate the credibility of textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) disinformation, and the effects of textual and multimodal fact checkers in refuting disinformation on school shootings and refugees. Our findings indicate that, irrespective of the source, multimodal disinformation is considered slightly more credible than textual disinformation. Fact checkers can help to overcome the potential harmful consequences of disinformation. We also found that fact checkers can overcome partisan and attitudinal filterswhich points to the relevance of fact checking as a journalistic discipline.

Populist politicians’ social media activity has often been associated with their electoral success. Yet, research on the driving forces of engagement on social media is scarce. Are populist politicians triggering more interaction than mainstream politicians, or is it rather the populist ideology they convey? To disentangle these different factors, we conducted a comparative content analysis of Twitter and Facebook communication of 13 leading candidates in Austria and the Netherlands during an election campaign. Findings show that it is rather styles conductive to populism (i.e. emotionality, first-person references) than the actual content of populist communication that trigger online behaviour. Importantly, irrespective of the content they convey, right-wing populist politicians are more successful in spreading their message via social media than mainstream politicians. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the role of online communication for populist politicians’ success in spreading their viewpoints across networked societies.