The (mis)information case study within the Agency project aims to explore the complex online harms arising from people’s encounters with information of questionable veracity, from sources with potentially dubious intentions. We ground such inquiry by working with young adults (18-25 years old), who as a demographic are understood as particularly vulnerable to misinformation, partially due to the socially embedded ways of encountering and assessing information online (e.g. through social media).

Within this case study, we intend to:

• Undertake a series of engagements with multisectoral industrial partners and stakeholders active in the space of misinformation and fake news.
• Undertake a series of design-led participatory workshops with young people to come up with scenarios of misinformation inflicted complex harm, and potential socio-technical responses to such harms.
• Prototype potential harm reducing technologies to be used as artefacts for undertaking further design-led research.

Through these research activities, we aim to contribute design implications and exemplar technological configurations for reducing complex harms inflicted by young adults’ susceptibility to misinformation.