Collective intelligence and a deliberative democratic system rest on the shoulders of a public free access to unbiased and diverse information. Social media has become a source of news and an important factor in opinion-formation. However, social media is not a neutral terrain but can be a platform for political manipulation.

This project aims to understand the cognitive, socio-affective, and neurobiological factors impacting our judgement of and response to information.This can conclude to behavioural recommendations that empower us to protect ourselves from manipulation and disinformation, and a targeted design of interventions to prevent their spread and the effective allocation of resources to protect those most vulnerable. 

Despite all efforts to mitigate mis- and disinformation, they continue to be a substantial problem. This project contributed to the literature base on mis- and disinformation about social media with an analysis of the interaction effects between temporal rhythms of disinformation and social media usage in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Specifically, how mis- and disinformation spread on Twitter varied throughout the day. Furthermore, it turns out that there are individual differences in users' propensity to spread mis- and disinformation on Twitter, which are based on their activity patterns.

We analysed a comprehensive dataset, examining the reliability of information relating the COVID-19 pandemic shared on Twitter. We clustered users into pseudo-chronotypes based on their activity patterns on Twitter throughout the day, identified times of waking and prolonged waking states per cluster as well as times of increased susceptibility.