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The world is facing the challenge of climate crisis. Despite the consensus in scientific community about anthropogenic global warming, the web is flooded with articles spreading climate misinformation. These articles are carefully…
We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we collected a large-scale dataset oftweets…
Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also disinformation. One prominent case of an event leading to circulation of disinformation on social media is the MH17 plane crash. Studies analysing the spread of…
In order to combat the creation and spread of harmful content online, this paper defines and contextualizes the concept of inauthentic, societal-scale manipulation by malicious actors. We review the literature on societally harmful content…
Hate speech and misinformation frequently co-occur online, amplifying prejudice and polarization. Given their scale, using Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist expert counterspeech (CS) writing has gained interest, yet prior work has…
The spreading of unsubstantiated rumors on online social networks (OSN) either unintentionally or intentionally (e.g., for political reasons or even trolling) can have serious consequences such as in the recent case of rumors about Ebola…
Disinformation spreads among the public and in scientific discourse through the actions of individuals, organizations, and governments that distort scholarly communications, media narratives, and institutional trust. This taxonomy…
In today's digital era, the Internet, especially social media platforms, plays a significant role in shaping public opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Unfortunately, the credibility of scientific information sources is often undermined by…
This study quantifies influence between media outlets by applying a novel methodology that uses causal effect estimation on networks and transformer language models. We demonstrate the obscured influence of state-controlled outlets over…
The present level of proliferation of fake, biased, and propagandistic content online has made it impossible to fact-check every single suspicious claim or article, either manually or automatically. Thus, many researchers are shifting their…
False information can be created and spread easily through the web and social media platforms, resulting in widespread real-world impact. Characterizing how false information proliferates on social platforms and why it succeeds in deceiving…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
Given the prevalence of online misinformation and our scarce cognitive capacity, Internet users have been shown to frequently fall victim to such information. As some studies have investigated psychological factors that make people…
Mis- and disinformation, commonly collectively called fake news, continue to menace society. Perhaps, the impact of this age-old problem is presently most plain in politics and healthcare. However, fake news is affecting an increasing…
We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially…
Recent events, such as the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Brexit and the COVID-19 "infodemic", have brought into the spotlight the dangers of online disinformation. There has been a lot of research focusing on fact-checking and…
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a dual challenge in the fight against disinformation. These powerful tools, capable of generating human-like text at scale, can be weaponised to produce sophisticated and persuasive…
Health misinformation is believed to have contributed to vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting concerns about the role of social media in polarization and social stability. While previous research has identified a…
As recent events have demonstrated, disinformation spread through social networks can have dire political, economic and social consequences. Detecting disinformation must inevitably rely on the structure of the network, on users…
Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of offensive content online such as fake news, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. While initially this was mostly about textual content, over time images and videos gained…