Summary

This project addressed the growing challenge of misinformation affecting vulnerable groups, with a particular focus on migrants in the UK. False or misleading information about immigration rules, healthcare, employment, and everyday rights can spread quickly through social media and private messaging spaces such as WhatsApp and Signal. For migrants, this risk is increased by language barriers, limited access to reliable information, and the complexity of navigating unfamiliar institutions.

Rather than treating misinformation only as a fact-checking problem, we explored it as a wider social and psychological issue. Therefore, this work examined what helps people recognise, respond to, and recover from harmful or misleading information.

This project aimed to understand what resilience to misinformation looks like in practice and how it can be strengthened in culturally sensitive ways. We combined literature review with lived experience research and has helped shift the focus from simply correcting false information to building stronger, more confident, and better supported communities that can navigate complex information environments safely.

Objectives

The main objectives of the project are listed below:

• Conduct a structured rapid review of academic, policy, and grey literature on misinformation affecting vulnerable populations, special focus on migrants.

• Develop an evidence matrix linking vulnerability types, misinformation tactics, and intervention approaches.

• Capture lived experiences of misinformation through qualitative engagement with migrants in the UK.

• Identify coping, recovery, and trust-rebuilding strategies used in response to misinformation.

• Define preliminary resilience indicators across behavioural, emotional, and cognitive dimensions.

• Inform future system design by outlining ethical, cultural, and practical principles for future interventions, including potential AI-enabled tools.

Activities

First, a structured rapid review of academic, policy, and grey literature was undertaken to examine how misinformation affects vulnerable groups, particularly migrants, and to map current intervention approaches. This work produced an evidence base on vulnerability, harms, communication channels, and resilience-building strategies. This evidence was used in the development of an evidence matrix to identify key gaps in current knowledge and practice.

Second, the project carried out empirical lived-experience research with migrants residing in the UK. This included nine semi-structured interviews and subsequent thematic analysis to identify how participants encountered misinformation, how they judged trustworthiness, what forms of harms they experienced, and what coping, recovery and trust-building strategies they used.

Finally, we designed a conceptual framework for building societal resilience to misinformation among migrants following trauma-informed and consent-based engagement principles.

Outcomes/outputs

We worked on different strands on this project, i.e., rapid literature review, semi-structured interviews with migrants to gather lived experience and produce a conceptual framework for building societal resilience against misinformation. We are planning to publish these works and in preparation of manuscripts.

Impact

The project generated both empirical and conceptual value. A key finding is that migrants do not simply need more facts, but they need support that helps them navigate trust, uncertainty, and recovery. Participants described a clear hierarchy of trust, with official sources such as Gov.uk often treated as the main source of truth, but also noted that these sources can be difficult to interpret in practice. As a result, migrants often rely on 'bridge' channels such as peers, social networks (e.g., Reddit), search engines (e.g., Google), workplace contacts, or community groups to interpret and verify information.

Our project also showed that misinformation-related harms are multi-dimensional. They include confusion, planning paralysis, anxiety, social withdrawal, financial loss, and delayed or suboptimal decisions. In some cases, misleading content or incomplete guidance had direct consequences for employment and visa-related planning. This matters because it shows that misinformation is not only a problem of false beliefs, it can affect wellbeing, participation, and life chances.

Importantly, the project identified resilience practices already used within migrant communities. Participants described peer-to-peer labelling of information, communal sense-making, reassurance within trusted groups, humour as a coping strategy, and deliberate practices of cross-checking and pausing before acting. These findings show that resilience is not simply an individual skill but also a social and relational process.

The project also highlighted practical design implications for future intervention. Participants expressed strong preferences for information that is proactive rather than reactive, multimodal rather than text-heavy, and personalised rather than generic. They valued combinations of fact and lived experience, clearer visual and audio formats, more responsive two-way communication, and carefully governed AI-supported assistance alongside trusted human intermediaries.

In social terms, the project supports inclusion by centring the experiences of a group that is often discussed but rarely consulted directly in misinformation research. Organisationally, the findings can help charities, digital inclusion teams, universities, and public bodies improve how they communicate with migrants and support safer information navigation. Economically, better guidance and earlier intervention could reduce wasted time, unnecessary spending on poor advice, and avoidable disruption to work or visa planning. From a policy and sector perspective, the project offers early evidence for a more resilience-oriented approach to misinformation that aligns with the wider TIPS agenda and can inform future practice in digital harms, migration support, and trustworthy AI.

Future work

The next stage of the work will focus on refining and validating the preliminary resilience framework and indicator set with a broader range of stakeholders. The follow-on activities can be included as extending the empirical work through additional engagement and survey-based validation, undertaking co-design with migrant-serving organisations and community intermediaries, and developing a more detailed intervention model for trustworthy support in private and semi-private digital spaces.

The project also creates a foundation for future research and funding proposals on AI-assisted misinformation resilience tools, especially tools that combine personalisation with clear safeguards, accessibility, and human oversight.

There are clear opportunities for stakeholders and researchers to get involved in the next phase. These include charities, migrant support organisations, local authorities, digital inclusion teams, universities, policymakers, and researchers working on misinformation, trust, digital harms, migration, and trustworthy AI. Their involvement could include co-design, validation of findings, piloting intervention approaches, and helping shape future funding applications and collaborative outputs.