About

Michelle A. Amazeen is an associate dean of research and an associate professor of mass communication at Boston University’s College of Communication. She directs the Communication Research Center and her research focuses on persuasion and misinformation, exploring the nature and persuasive effects of misinformation and efforts to correct it. She employs a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to produce results with practical applications for journalists, educators, policymakers, and consumers, helping them recognize and resist persuasion and misinformation in the media. Dr. Amazeen is one of 22 prominent scholars worldwide who contributed to The Debunking Handbook 2020 and has been ranked among the top 2% of highly-cited scholars globally by Stanford University since 2021. Her research has been published in leading academic journals and cited over 60 times in policy documents worldwide. She has served as an expert contributor to organizations such as the Australian Academy of Science, the European Research Council, and the US Institute for Museum and Library Services, and has presented her research to US federal agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration. Currently, she is a co-investigator on the Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative, focusing on climate issues in native advertising. Her upcoming book, Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation, is set to be published by MIT Press in November 2025. Her career in communication began with roles in radio sales and management, and she has also worked in corporate research and advertising effectiveness before returning to academia.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Art
• Medicine
• Virology
• Law
• Art history
• Internet privacy
• Pathology
• Public relations
• Immunology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Climate Action and Native Advertising: How Fossil Fuel Companies Present Environmental Commitment in American and British News Media

  The International Journal of Press/Politics · 2025-11-14

  article

  Confronting severe economic challenges in the twenty-first century, many news media are forging new relationships with advertisers, including the focus of this study: native advertising. At the same time, as the climate crisis worsens, and political pressures and news coverage increase, we are seeing the fossil fuel industry expand and shift its communication about the topic. This study sits at the intersection of these trends: we ask to what extent, and how, native advertisements are being employed in fossil fuel communication campaigns. We analyze 252 native ads sponsored by fossil fuel companies between 2014 and 2022 in leading English-language news outlets. Led by human quantitative content analysis, with supplementary automated text analysis, we show that the style of climate science denial documented by, for example, Oreskes and Conway, is absent from native ad communications; in its place are frequent mentions of the environment, the reality of climate change, and the need to decarbonize. In fact, the primary position of fossil fuel companies in our data is the assertion that they are leading the decarbonization of energy systems. To do so, they strongly emphasize the relative virtues of natural gas and promote investments in unproven new technologies. A secondary tactic emphasizes the importance of energy to development and quality of life. Our discussion explores the challenges of analyzing claims that are often superficially true but misleading in context and the questions misleading native advertising raises for news media in a challenging digital media landscape.

  PublisherDOI

• Fact-checking

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The “Future of Energy”? Building resilience to ExxonMobil’s disinformation through disclosures and inoculation

  npj Climate Action · 2025-03-04 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Disinformation campaigns can significantly impact beliefs about climate change. This study involved an online experiment with 1045 U.S. participants, exposing them to a misleading ExxonMobil advertisement, some with disclosures and others preceded by inoculation messages. Participants were divided into five conditions: a control group, a group exposed to pre-bunking messages from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and groups shown social media posts featuring the ad—with or without disclosures—claiming ExxonMobil’s commitment to renewable energy. Results showed the ad effectively influenced beliefs, but disclosures helped participants recognize the content as advertising, and inoculation messages reduced susceptibility, though not entirely. These findings highlight the value of using disclosures and inoculation to counter climate disinformation, providing a foundation for communication strategies that support climate action.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Content Confusion

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2025-11-18 · 1 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How mainstream news organizations and advertisers contribute to and legitimize disinformation by blurring the line between ads and journalism. We often blame social media for the rampant problem of disinformation, but mainstream news media is also at fault. Not only do news outlets disguise paid content to look like online news articles, a practice called “native advertising,” but new research suggests that this form of advertising even influences the real journalism that appears next to it—both perceptions of the journalism as well as its actual substance. In Content Confusion, Michelle Amazeen explores the origins and evolution of this mainstream media practice, how it affects audiences and the industry, and what the implications are for an accurately informed public. For policymakers, in particular, the book highlights the long-standing principles from governmental regulation as well as industry professional codes that support clear identification of the provenance of content, an issue that will no doubt intensify with the release of generative artificial intelligence in the wild.

  PublisherDOI

• Online vaccine misinformation and susceptible publics: Understanding the differences between misinformation-immune, -vulnerable, -receptive, and -amplifying publics’ perceptions and behavioral intentions

  Telematics and Informatics · 2025-04-25 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Development and validation of the Misinformation Susceptibility Self-Report (MiSS)

  2025-07-11

  preprintOpen access

  The ability to discern between true and false information is a skill that varies between individuals. As such, an accurate measure of self-reported individual susceptibility to misinformation is crucial for both research and intervention development. While discernment-based instruments currently exist, there is a lack of effective and generalizable tools with good psychometric properties that capture the factors which drive susceptibility. To address this, we developed and validated the 15-item Misinformation Susceptibility Self-Report (MiSS) using a political headline discernment task. The MiSS was found to display good internal consistency as well as strong predictive validity (r = 0.52–.64) as measured using the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST-20; Maertens et al., 2024), and a political and health claim discernment task. An assessment of the factor structure and test information characteristics also revealed the ability of the MiSS to provide unique insights into attitudes and behaviors underlying susceptibility across levels of misinformation discernment ability. Being the first psychometrically validated self-report scale for assessing individual differences in misinformation susceptibility, the MiSS presents a number of novel opportunities for advancing theoretical understanding, and has the potential to become an invaluable tool for the development of targeted misinformation interventions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Predicting Health Misperceptions: The Role of eHealth Literacy and Situational Perceptions

  Health Communication · 2024-09-25 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  This study sought to understand how health misperceptions develop among individuals after exposure to misinformation messages, and how eHealth literacy and situational motivation in problem solving are associated with the negative effects of misinformation exposure. We also sought to understand the differentiated effects of misinformation exposure on the four misinformation-susceptible publics. Results from two studies revealed that situational motivation was positively associated with the formation of misperceptions after misinformation exposure as well as individuals' likelihood of amplifying the misinformation message. However, eHealth literacy does not reduce misperceptions, as had been hypothesized. In fact, eHealth literacy was not significantly associated with misperceptions or with misinformation amplification likelihood. Results also provide support for the typology of misinformation-susceptible publics as misinformation-amplifying publics were the most susceptible to misinformation messages.

  PublisherDOI

• The misinformation recognition and response model: an emerging theoretical framework for investigating antecedents to and consequences of misinformation recognition

  Human Communication Research · 2023-10-24 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Although research on misinformation and corrections has recently proliferated, no systematic structure has guided the examination of conditions under which misinformation is most likely to be recognized and the potential ensuing effects of recognition. The Misinformation Recognition and Response Model (MRRM) provides a framework for investigating the antecedents to and consequences of misinformation recognition. The model theorizes that how people cope with exposure to misinformation and/or intervention messages is conditioned by both dispositional and situational individual characteristics and is part of a process mediated by informational problem identification, issue motivation, and—crucially—recognition of misinformation. Whether or not recognition is activated then triggers differential cognitive coping strategies which ultimately affect consequent cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. Working to explore the notion of misinformation will be more fruitful if researchers take into consideration how various perspectives fit together and form a larger picture. The MRRM offers guidance on a multi-disciplinary understanding of recognizing and responding to misinformation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Refuting misinformation: Examining theoretical underpinnings of refutational interventions

  Current Opinion in Psychology · 2023-11-25 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Native Advertising in Digital News Contexts

  2023-01-25 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The chapter will begin by defining what I mean by native advertising and briefly putting it in historical context, linking to the advertorials and puff pieces of yesteryear and previous scholarship on integrated advertising. I will then draw upon empirical studies (my own as well as in the extant literature) to explain how native advertising affects news consumers (generally received negatively and as overwhelmingly deceptive) as well as the journalism industry (tarnishes the reporting of actual journalists, competes for attention with actual journalism, and may also whitewash and cut the real news agenda). The chapter will close with a discussion of how this practice contributes to the misinformation pandemic, to declining trust in media, and the resulting implications for democratic ideals.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John A. Lent

  13 shared

• Stephan Lewandowsky

  University of Bristol

  6 shared

• Arunima Krishna

  Boston University

  6 shared

• Chris J. Vargo

  6 shared

• Ullrich K. H. Ecker

  5 shared

• John Cook

  University of Melbourne

  4 shared

• Panayiota Kendeou

  University of Minnesota

  3 shared

• Emily K. Vraga

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Communication

  University of X

  2005

• M.A., Communication

  University of Y

  2000

• B.A., Communication

  University of Z

  1998