The panic and anxiety that accompanies a global pandemic is only exacerbated by the spread of misinformation. For COVID-19, in many parts of the world, such misinformation is circulating through globally popular mobile instant messaging services (MIMS) like WhatsApp and Telegram. Compared to more public social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, these services offer private, intimate, and often encrypted spaces for users to chat with family members and friends, making it difficult for the platform to moderate misinformation on them. Thus, there is an enhanced onus on users of MIMS to curb misinformation by correcting their family and friends within these spaces. Research on understanding how such relational correction occurs in different parts of the globe will need to attend to how the nature of these interpersonal relationships and the cultural dynamics that influence them shape the correction process. Thus, as people increasingly use MIMS to connect with close relations to make sense of this global crisis, studying the issue of misinformation on these services requires us to adopt a relationship-centered and culturally informed approach.

What misinformation means and what it means to be someone who corrects it is socially contested, especially in interpersonal contexts where politeness expectations complicate correction. Given this flux in meaning, we analyze posts about misinformation correction in interpersonal contexts from the AmItheAsshole subreddit through a relational dialectics theory (RDT) lens. Findings revealed that discourses of misinformation as harmful and as innocuous and potentially helpful constituted the meaning of misinformation, while discourses of misinformation correctors as inconsiderate and as communal guardians constituted the meaning of misinformation correctors. The latter meaning was dependent on the meaning of misinformation and the adjacent ideology of politeness. Thus, we extend RDT by elucidating how the meaning of a semantic object is predicated on a web of larger intertextual meaning.

The correction of misinformation is an important scholarly and practical endeavor. Understanding the correction process requires drawing on theorizing from a multitude of perspectives. This interview study of (N = 26) Indian young adults in Delhi uses an affordances perspective in combination with face-negotiation theory to understand how face considerations during a misinformation correction are tied to different social and mobile media affordances that influence channel selection. While older family members share falsehoods on WhatsApp group chats, corrections rarely occur there. Instead, perceived synchronicity, bandwidth, and publicness affordances of different channels that support politeness and face concerns influence channel choice for correction. Thus, this study not only provides an interesting context for understanding these affordances, but also adds to the literature on misinformation correction by highlighting the role of social and contextual factors, and demonstrates the utility of CMC and interpersonal communication theory in understanding misinformation correction.

This study explores mobile phone use among female live-out (as opposed to live-in) domestic workers in Delhi. Through interviews with 102 workers, it examines two main themes. First, it provides a nuanced perspective on the relationship between mobile telephony and women's empowerment by viewing the impact of the device through the conceptual lens of restricted agency. It finds that for marginalized women who have limited options available to them, the device is integrated into existing power structures that remain unaltered. Yet, it is within the constraints imposed on them by patriarchal cultural beliefs and their low socioeconomic status that they utilize the mobile phone to gain a greater sense of autonomy and control over their domestic and professional lives. Second, this study also examines the economic impact of the mobile phone on their work. It finds that the device enhances their productivity and makes job-seeking more efficient. Moreover, it is the workers' ability to stay in touch with family and friends, which can often be ignored amidst the heavy focus on instrumental business-related uses of the mobile phone, that significantly contributes towards the device's positive impact on their work.

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