Sacha Altay is a researcher associated with an academic line of work critiquing the conceptual and methodological foundations of misinformation research.
Research
Altay is the lead author, with Manon Berriche and Alberto Acerbi, of "Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges," published in Social Media + Society in the January–March 2023 special issue on multidisciplinary approaches to mis- and disinformation studies (DOI 10.1177/20563051221150412).
The paper advances three structural critiques of the literature: that "misinformation" is operationalized inconsistently across studies, conflating rumor, satire and ideologically driven false claims, which may have different effect dynamics; that many prominent studies have low external validity, small effect sizes, or methodological flaws that do not survive replication; and that population-level effects on belief and behavior are typically small relative to the policy responses invoking them. The authors argue that the gap between the strength of the misinformation-crisis framing and the strength of the underlying evidence is itself worth examining (Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges — Altay, Berriche, Acerbi (Social Media + Society, 2023)).
The work is the academic counterpart to Joseph Bernstein's institutional-interest critique of the same discourse. It bears on AI and Democracy and AI and Misinformation, where quantitative claims about AI-driven election misinformation can be set against this skeptical literature.