Related papers: A quick how-to user-guide to debunking pseudoscien…
Researchers in NLP often frame and discuss research results in ways that serve to deemphasize the field's successes, often in response to the field's widespread hype. Though well-meaning, this has yielded many misleading or false claims…
Automated audits of recommender systems found that blindly following recommendations leads users to increasingly partisan, conspiratorial, or false content. At the same time, studies using real user traces suggest that recommender systems…
With vast amounts of high-quality information at our fingertips, how is it possible that many people believe that the Earth is flat and vaccination harmful? Motivated by this question, we quantify the implications of an opinion formation…
The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around common interests, worldviews and narratives. However, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called {\em wisdom of…
Research in combating misinformation reports many negative results: facts may not change minds, especially if they come from sources that are not trusted. Individuals can disregard and justify lies told by trusted sources. This problem is…
The early 2020s has seen the rise of two strange and potentially quite impactful social phenomena, namely pseudolaw, where users rely upon pseudolegal arguments that mimic the form and ritual of legal argumentation but fundamentally distort…
The ability to discern between true and false information is essential to making sound decisions. However, with the recent increase in AI-based disinformation campaigns, it has become critical to understand the influence of deceptive…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…
Billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, but many remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. The ability to…
Typical fact verification models use retrieved written evidence to verify claims. Evidence sources, however, often change over time as more information is gathered and revised. In order to adapt, models must be sensitive to subtle…
The rapid adoption of large language models has introduced a new class of AI-generated fake news that coexists with traditional human-written misinformation, raising important questions about how these two forms of deceptive content differ…
People often receive good news that makes them feel better about the world around them, or bad news that makes them feel worse about it. This paper studies how the valence of news affects belief updating, absent functional and ego-relevant…
Consumers increasingly rate, review and research products online. Consequently, websites containing consumer reviews are becoming targets of opinion spam. While recent work has focused primarily on manually identifiable instances of opinion…
We believe, in the sense of supporting ideas and considering them correct while dismissing doubts about them. We take sides about ideas and theories as if that was the right thing to do. And yet, from a rational point of view, this type of…
This article reports on a Research through Design study exploring how to design a tool for helping readers of science journalism understand the strength and uncertainty of scientific evidence in news stories about health science, using both…
The prevalence of unwarranted beliefs, spanning pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and conspiracy theories, presents substantial societal hurdles and the risk of disseminating misinformation. Utilizing established psychometric assessments,…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
Quantum Darwinism recognizes the role of the environment as a communication channel: Decoherence can selectively amplify information about the pointer states of a system of interest (preventing access to complementary information about…
In the past decade, the social networks platforms and micro-blogging sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Weibo have become an integral part of our day-to-day activities and is widely used all over the world by billions of users…