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The global spread of political misinformation poses serious challenges to democracies, eroding trust and distorting public discourse. However, research has largely focused on WEIRD countries—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—limiting our understanding of how misinformation operates across diverse political, cultural, and technological contexts. This special issue addresses these gaps through comparative, cross-platform, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The articles explore how political and media systems shape misinformation, the role of individual resilience, and how platform-specific features—across social media, messaging apps, and traditional media—affect the spread of false information. Studies from non-WEIRD regions offer insights into distinct vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for context-sensitive approaches. Together, these contributions advance our understanding of misinformation as a global challenge and offer guidance for strengthening democratic resilience in varied information environments.

26:T554,

Democratic societies inherently depend on an informed citizenry. By shaping citizens’ voting behavior, fostering political cynicism, and reducing trust in institutions, misinformation can pose significant challenges to individuals and societies. Against this backdrop, fact-checking initiatives aimed at verifying the accuracy of publicly disseminated (mis)information have flourished worldwide. However, existing research is disproportionately oriented toward the Global North, with a focus on the United States and the most influential organizations. Equally scarce are comparative studies. To address these shortcomings, this study introduces a context-sensitive framework for analyzing fact-checking cultures and illustrates its application in a cross-national comparative design by contrasting two countries from the Global South and North: Brazil and Germany. Using a mixed-methods design, we integrate computational, qualitative, and quantitative content analysis of 11 fact-checking organizations and 13,498 fact-checking articles over 11 years (2013–2023), alongside qualitative semistructured interviews with fact-checkers (N = 10). Our findings reveal several areas of divergence and convergence, suggesting that fact-checking cultures transcend organizational and national boundaries.

27:T53b,

While there is a strong scholarly interest surrounding the content of political misinformation online, much of this research concerns misinformation in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. Although such research has investigated the topical and styli