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Sometimes you just can't win, and that goes double for people navigating the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States. Having nuanced opinions of politics in the U.S. turns out to be a very lonely, and unpopular, road, according to a recent study from a research team that includes assistant professor Aviva Philipp-Muller from Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business.

Trust in Government Measure also aims to help inform better public health policies. People are less likely to adopt new health policies if they don't have faith in their government, and a new tool from University of Waterloo researchers aims to fix that. The tool - designed by a team based in Waterloo's School of Public Health Sciences - aids lawmakers in how trustworthy they may appear to the public and could help improve the uptake of public health policies by informing their design and communication.

Waterloo Engineering researchers are developing new technologies to combat disinformation - a robust solution to fake news By John Roe Faculty of Engineering Cutting-edge technologies gave the world fake news, but researchers from the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Engineering are developing even newer technology to stop it.

Study shows that migrants don't cause crime rates to increase but false perceptions endure Many people who oppose immigration say that it increases crime. But does immigration really affect crime? Studying a country whose proportion of migrants has tripled in less than ten years, researchers find immigration significantly impacts people's perceptions of crime but has no effect on actual crime.

In disinformation campaigns, like the long-standing pro-Kremlin campaign targeted at Ukraine by the Russian government, who is most at risk of believing false information? A study led by McGill University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that Ukrainians who engaged in more analytic thinking were less likely to believe the pro-Kremlin disinformation, even if they were generally pro-Russia.

R esearchers at the University of Toronto, Dartmouth College, the University of Exeter and the University of Kent have found that fact checking can quickly correct misperceptions about COVID-19 - but that beliefs in wrong information often return.

Conspiracy theories have mutated into conspiracism , a transformation marked by people rejecting proof and evidence in favour of frivolous speculation. That's what political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum suggest in their book A Lot of People are Saying . In short, conspiracism is conspiracy without the theory.