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This conceptual paper wishes to contribute to the debate on digitally mediated movements by developing the perspective of ‘contentious branding’. The empirical research has followed the #Occupy and #Anonymous hashtags around popular social media, reconstructing their highly heterogeneous adoption. A branding perspective on contentious politics is aimed at highlighting the diverse and sometimes contradictory appropriations of the ‘semiotic repertoires’ of protest movements, particularly apparent within digital networks of communication. A contentious branding perspective on social movements not only tries to fit these specific cases better: it intends to provide an epistemological and methodological device to sustain a non-essentialist understanding of social movements in general, and to face the challenges and opportunities of digital social movement research in particular. The first section of the paper briefly discusses the concepts ‘social movement’ and ‘branding’, characterizing the proposed idea of ‘contentious branding’. Some insights derived from a broader digital exploration on the uses of the hashtags #Occupy and #Anonymous then serve to emphasize their variable, incoherent and at times contradictory utilization: few of the several reiterations of the brand Occupy, deviating from its original use, are presented, and a heuristic categorization of Anonymous’ diverse issues of involvement is proposed. Based on this, the discussion further develops the concept of contentious branding, clarifying its analytical boundaries vis a vis neighboring approaches in social movement theory. The conclusion discusses some of the epistemological and methodological implications that contentious branding bears for the study of social movements in the digital age.

Although previous research has offered important insights into the consequences of mis- and disinformation and the effectiveness of corrective information, we know markedly less about how different types of corrective information ��� news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers ��� can be combined to counter different forms of misinformation. Against this backdrop, this paper reports on experiments in the US and the Netherlands (N = 1,091) that exposed people to evidence-based or fact-free anti-immigration misinformation, fact-checkers and/or a media literacy intervention. The main findings indicate that evidence-based misinformation is seen as more accurate than fact-free misinformation, and the combination of news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers is most effective in lowering issue agreement and perceived accuracy of misinformation across countries. These findings have important implications for journalism practice and policy makers that aim to combat mis- and disinformation.