Here’s an overview of my publications and working papers. Follow the links to find more information about the papers and the journals or browse my Google Scholar.

Manuscripts under preparation

(what I have been thinking about more recently)

Lühring, J., Garcia, D., Waldherr, A., Lasser, J., Shetty, A., & May, H. (2025). Quantifying the causal effects of misinformation on emotions and engagement on social media. Most of what we know about misinformation comes from lab experiments or observational social media data, and neither of which tells us what actually happens when real people encounter real misinformation in their real information environments. Using 9.9 million German tweets linking to news sources, we built synthetic control groups by matching trustworthy and untrustworthy posts on political bias, topic, author characteristics, and the emotions already present in the post itself. That lets us isolate what misinformation actually does, rather than what just happens alongside it. The results show a distinct fingerprint: Untrustworthy news made up only 6% of shared articles but got 39% more retweets and 12% more quote tweets, while getting 14% fewer likes and 19% fewer replies. So it’s not “viral engagement” across the board; it’s specifically more amplification by selective users. The replies it does get are angrier (+9%), more disgusted (+22%), more fearful (+12%), and less joyful (-12%). But when we follow individual users across both kinds of news, the anger effect partly disappears. The emotion isn’t just provoked by the untrustworthy post, it’s brought to it by a selection of already angry users. TLDR; misinformation has real causal effects on how people behave online, but it also just spreads by attracting the users most primed to do so (as with most things related to political communication).

Lühring, J., Garcia, D., Lukito, J., Shetty, A., & Waldherr, A. (in prep.). Anger and fear predict individual misinformation sharing but not collective patterns on Twitter. Emotions and misinformation are often assumed to drive each other on social media: anxious or angry users share more untrustworthy news, and exposure to that content makes them more anxious or angry. But a pattern that holds across a population at a given moment isn’t the same as a pattern that holds within individuals over time: aggregate trends can mask individual mechanisms, and individual tendencies don’t always scale up to visible collective dynamics. Using three years of Austrian Twitter data (~29,000 users, 2019–2023), we study how emotions and misinformation sharing co-evolve at both levels. At the collective level, anger, fear, and misinformation all respond to major events (COVID lockdown, Vienna attack, Russian invasion of Ukraine) but show little evidence of mutually reinforcing each other once shared event-driven variation is accounted for. At the individual level, only 14% of users ever engaged with untrustworthy sources, and engagement was predicted by stable emotional traits (higher baseline anger, greater variability and instability) rather than by momentary emotional states before sharing. TLDR; misinformation spread looks more like “selection” than “contagion”, with events increasing exposure for everyone, but only users with particular emotional profiles systematically engage with low-credibility content.

Peer-reviewed articles

Lühring, J., Metzler, H., Lazzaroni, R. M., Shetty, A., & Lasser, J. (2025). Best practices for source-based research on misinformation and news trustworthiness using NewsGuard. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2025.003

Lühring†, J., Shetty†, A., Koschmieder, C., Garcia, D., Waldherr, A., & Metzler, H. (2024). Emotions in misinformation studies: Distinguishing affective state from emotional response and misinformation recognition from acceptance. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 9(1), 82. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-024-00607-0

Lühring, J., Hameleers, M., Humprecht, E., & Möller, J. (2024). Trust in a digital world. The roles of media trust and ordinary citizen cues in online disinformation’s credibility. Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 3/2024(72), 1–16. https://www.doi.org/10.5771/ 1615-634X-2024-3-297

Hameleers, M., Humprecht, E., Möller, J., & Lühring, J. (2021). Degrees of deception: The effects of different types of COVID-19 misin- formation and the effectiveness of corrective information in cri- sis times. Information, Communication & Society, 26(9), 1699–1715. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.2021270

† equal contributions