The Social Science Research Council launched the Mercury Project, a new, $10M+ initiative dedicated to investigating the impacts of health misinformation and evaluating interventions to prevent its spread.
The SSRC is now accepting letters of inquiry for research projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States to discover evidence-based, data-driven tools, methods, and interventions to build a healthier information environment. The Mercury Project invites proposals for research projects that address one or more of the following goals:
- estimating the causal impacts of mis- and disinformation on online and offline outcomes in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, including health, economic, and/or social outcomes, differential impacts across socio-demographic groups, and quantifying the global costs of those impacts;
- estimating the causal impacts of online or offline interventions in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States to increase uptake of Covid-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation, including interventions that target the producers or the consumers of mis- and disinformation, or that increase confidence in reliable information.