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In this digital era, online shopping is common practice in our daily lives. Product reviews significantly influence consumer buying behavior and help establish buyer trust. However, the prevalence of fraudulent reviews undermines this trust…
Recommendation systems are an increasingly prominent part of the web, accounting for up to a third of all traffic on several of the world's most popular sites. Nevertheless, little is known about how much activity such systems actually…
This study uses agent-based modeling to examine the impact of various recommendation algorithms on the propagation of misinformation on online social networks. We simulate a synthetic environment consisting of heterogeneous agents,…
The internet promised to democratize access to knowledge and make the world more open and understanding. The reality of today's internet, however, is far from this ideal. Misinformation, lies, and conspiracies dominate many social media…
We demonstrate the Misinformation Concierge, a proof-of-concept that provides actionable intelligence on misinformation prevalent in social media. Specifically, it uses language processing and machine learning tools to identify subtopics of…
An analysis drawing on Signal Detection Theory suggests that people may fall for misinformation because they are unable to discern true from false information (truth insensitivity) or because they tend to accept information with a…
Although billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. However, exposure…
Online reviews significantly impact consumers' decision-making process and firms' economic outcomes and are widely seen as crucial to the success of online markets. Firms, therefore, have a strong incentive to manipulate ratings using fake…
Digital platforms, including social networks, are major sources of economic information. Evidence suggests that digital platforms display different socioeconomic opportunities to demographic groups. Our work addresses this issue by…
Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the online sharing of medical information, with videos representing a large fraction of such online sources. Previous studies have however shown that more than half of the health-related…
Social media platforms often assume that users can self-correct against misinformation. However, social media users are not equally susceptible to all misinformation as their biases influence what types of misinformation might thrive and…
This paper develops an agent-based automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation. We demonstrate that combining a powerful LLM agent, which does not have access to the internet for searches, with an online web search agent…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
Twitter, prompted by the rapid spread of alternative narratives, started actively warning users about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. This form of soft moderation comes in two forms: as a warning cover before the Tweet is displayed…
Prior work has extensively studied misinformation related to news, politics, and health, however, misinformation can also be about technological topics. While less controversial, such misinformation can severely impact companies'…
What do pickles and trampolines have in common? In this paper we show that while purchases for these products may seem innocuous, they risk revealing clues about customers' personal attributes - in this case, their race. As online retail…
The spread of misinformation through online social media platforms has had substantial societal consequences. As a result, platforms have introduced measures to alert users of news content that may be misleading or contain inaccuracies as a…
Social media has a misinformation problem, and counterspeech -- fighting bad speech with more speech -- has been an ineffective solution. Here, we argue that bridging-based ranking -- an algorithmic approach to promoting content favored by…
Despite ample supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the proportion of fully vaccinated individuals remains suboptimal across much of the US. Rapid vaccination of additional people will prevent new infections among both the unvaccinated and the…
A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers…