Promoting the need for truthful information to foster a democracy built on trust.
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The Fondation Descartes

The Fondation Descartes is a citizen-based, non-partisan, and independent European foundation dedicated to information-based issues.

Operations and Governance

The Fondation Descartes is structured around three main bodies: a board of directors chaired by Jean-Philippe Hecketsweiler; a scientific advisory board led by Gérald Bronner; and a permanent team headed by Laurent Cordonier, director of research.

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Our reports

Each year, the Fondation Descartes publishes an in-depth study on one of its key topics related to disinformation: conflicts, health, or climate. Explore these publications in full.

Thematic overviews

The Fondation Descartes publishes thematic overviews written by its research team on major themes related to information and disinformation.

Experts' blog

The Fondation Descartes publishes contributions from its affiliated experts, who speak in a personal capacity. The expert circle is multidisciplinary, including specialists from information and communication sciences, cognitive and behavioral sociology, international relations, philosophy, psychology, and journalism.

Our annual conferences

The Fondation Descartes organises annual conferences revolving around health, climate and conflict disinformation.

Our partnerships

In its efforts to tackle disinformation, the Fondation Descartes joins forces with other key players in the information ecosystem.

Our podcasts

With France Info, the Fondation Descartes explores historical disinformation in its podcast series "Les Infox de l'Histoire."

Actors

The Descartes Foundation offers you a cartography of the main actors involved in researching on the quality of information, or in fighting against disinformation, in France and throughout the world.

Initiatives

Fact checkers, web extensions, journalistic standards... The Fondation Descartes offers you a map of initiatives in France and around the world involved in asserting the quality of information or in fighting against disinformation.

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Syntheses of research papers

To best understand what is occurring today around fake news and misinformation, Fondation Descartes is making summaries of key scientific publications on this topic available to all interested citizens. Without being exhaustive, these summaries allow us all to have an overview of current research, issues in question and the key results obtained. These summaries also can inform debate and deconstruct preconceived ideas relating to misinformation.

They will take on sometimes technical questions. We have made the choice not to hide the complexities, but to give as many tools as possible for understanding, so that anyone who is interested and motivated by the subject can understand the foundations and become familiar with scientific research tools. These summaries are also an opportunity to have an overview of practices and methods of scientific research in social sciences, for those who are interested.

 

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Labels set up on social networks to indicate that content is potentially false or misleading have limited effectiveness.

This study by Benjamin Lyons and his colleagues supports the Dunning-Kruger effect. On average, 70% of participants surveyed overestimated their ability to distinguish between reliable information and fake news.

At what point during the reading of a misleading article should such a warning be issued in order to maximize its effectiveness?

Few studies have examined the motivations that lead individuals to spread false information online. This study does so in Nigeria, a country that has been heavily impacted by the spread of fake news.

While numerous studies have examined the impact of fake news on those who read them, few studies allow us to understand what these readers do with such misleading information.

In this article, a team of psychologists tries to explain why we sometimes share false information on the Internet.

This present study demonstrates that, beyond their relationship to fake news, “analytical” and “intuitive” individuals exhibit different behaviors on Twitter.

False allegations regarding large-scale voter fraud were widely circulated shortly before the 2020 US presidential election. To what extent did US voters believe this misleading information?

This CSA report analyzes the mechanisms by which false information spreads on Twitter.

This article, which regroups four experimental studies, shows that individuals generally avoid voluntarily sharing fake news for fear that it will affect their reputation.

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