Countermeasures for Mitigating Digital Misinformation: A Systematic Review

IPIE's systematic review of countermeasures for mitigating digital misinformation is the most comprehensive evidence synthesis of what actually works in counter-disinformation available in the grey literature. Drawing on the systematic review methodology used in medical research — with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, quality assessment of individual studies, and synthesis across evidence streams — the report evaluates the effectiveness of the main categories of counter-disinformation intervention: prebunking and inoculation, fact-checking and debunking, media literacy training, content labelling, friction-based interventions, and source credibility signals.

The report's contribution to the field is both substantive and methodological. Substantively, it provides the most rigorous available evidence base for intervention design — identifying which approaches have consistent positive effects, which have mixed or context-dependent effects, and which lack adequate evidence. Methodologically, it demonstrates that the systematic review approach is feasible for the misinformation field and produces more reliable conclusions than narrative reviews or single-study citations. Read alongside the Carnegie Endowment's Bateman & Jackson policy guide — which takes an explicitly policy-oriented approach to the same evidence — the IPIE systematic review provides the academic rigour that policy recommendations require.