Crisis affectedness, elite cues and IO public legitimacy.

What effects do international crises have on the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs)? Deviating from previous research, we argue that such crises make those international organizations more salient that are mandated to solve the respective crisis. This results in two main effects. First, the public legitimacy of those IOs becomes more dependent on citizens' crisis-induced worries, leading to a more positive view of those IOs. Second, as the higher salience also leads to higher levels of elite communication regarding IOs, elite blaming of the IOs during crises results in direct negative effects on public legitimacy beliefs on IOs. Finally, both the valence and content of the elite discourse additionally moderate the positive effects of crisis-induced worries. Implementing survey experiments on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis with about 4400 respondents in Austria, Germany and Turkey, we find preliminary evidence for the expectations derived from our salience argument. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on IO legitimacy and IO legitimation. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-021-09452-y.

The Battlefront of Combating Misinformation and Coping with Media Bias

Misinformation is a pressing issue in modern society. It arouses a mixture of anger, distrust, confusion, and anxiety that cause damage on our daily life judgments and public policy decisions. While recent studies have explored various fake news detection and media bias detection techniques in attempts to tackle the problem, there remain many ongoing challenges yet to be addressed, as can be witnessed from the plethora of untrue and harmful content present during the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave rise to the first social-media infodemic, and the international crises of late. In this tutorial, we provide researchers and practitioners with a systematic overview of the frontier in fighting misinformation. Specifically, we dive into the important research questions of how to (i) develop a robust fake news detection system that not only fact-checks information pieces provable by background knowledge, but also reason about the consistency and the reliability of subtle details about emerging events;(ii) uncover the bias and the agenda of news sources to better characterize misinformation;as well as (iii) correct false information and mitigate news biases, while allowing diverse opinions to be expressed. Participants will learn about recent trends, representative deep neural network language and multimedia models, ready-to-use resources, remaining challenges, future research directions, and exciting opportunities to help make the world a better place, with safer and more harmonic information sharing. © 2022 Owner/Author.