In this article, we look at how basic film studies knowledge and rhetorical analysis techniques can be used to pick apart the appeals to emotion made by disinformation.

In March, the Russian website Panorama published an article claiming that Joseph Stalin had made a 1947 prediction about ways the United States would fight geopolitical rivals in the future.

If we’re to learn one thing from the torrent of coronavirus-related information we’ve been bombarded with in recent months - what the World Health Organization has labelled an infodemic – it should be something about our failures.

GQ magazine recently published a glorious series of interviews with Robert Pattinson, possibly humanity’s weirdest, most delightfully baffling celebrity.

This is not the first time that sites like Twitter or YouTube have had to enforce tougher restrictions, but these recent examples at the very least serve to remind us that we are still behind in the fight against false information.

COVID-19 wasn’t made in a lab, but it couldn’t have been better designed as a subject of misinformation and conspiracy theories. However, several states have also used some of the common themes emerging from COVID-19 conspiracies to further their diplomatic ends.

In this in-depth report, we explore a persistent coronavirus origin myth - that it is a leaked bioweapon - tracing it back to a little-known Indian conspiracy site and finding parallels to Soviet disinformation campaigns.