Related papers: Friction Interventions to Curb the Spread of Misin…
Design features of social media platforms, such as infinite scroll, increase users' likelihood of experiencing normative dissociation -- a mental state of absorption that diminishes self-awareness and disrupts memory. This paper…
Social media are massive marketplaces where ideas and news compete for our attention. Previous studies have shown that quality is not a necessary condition for online virality and that knowledge about peer choices can distort the…
Fake news is a growing problem in developing countries with potentially far-reaching consequences. We conduct a randomized experiment in urban Pakistan to evaluate the effectiveness of two educational interventions to counter misinformation…
Language models are transforming the ways that their users engage with the world. Despite impressive capabilities, over-consumption of language model outputs risks propagating unchecked errors in the short-term and damaging human…
A widespread moderation strategy by online news platforms is to feature what the platform deems high quality comments, usually called editor picks or featured comments. In this paper, we compare online discussions of news articles in which…
Corrections given by ordinary social media users, also referred to as Social Correction have emerged as a viable intervention against misinformation as per the recent literature. However, little is known about how often users give disputing…
Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings. However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers in digital…
Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we…
Designing seamless, frictionless user experiences has long been a dominant trend in both applied behavioral science and artificial intelligence (AI), in which the goal of making desirable actions easy and efficient informs efforts to…
Widely distributed misinformation shared across social media channels is a pressing issue that poses a significant threat to many aspects of society's well-being. Inaccurate shared information causes confusion, can adversely affect mental…
The spreading of news, memes and other pieces of information occurring via online social platforms has a strong and growing impact on our modern societies, with enormous consequences, that may be beneficial but also catastrophic. In this…
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…
The rise of social media has enabled the widespread propagation of fake news, text that is published with an intent to spread misinformation and sway beliefs. Rapidly detecting fake news, especially as new events arise, is important to…
Misinformation spread through social media has become a fundamental challenge in modern society. Recent studies have evaluated various strategies for addressing this problem, such as by modifying social media platforms or educating people…
Social media have become the main vehicle of information production and consumption online. Millions of users every day log on their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get updates and news, read about their topics of interest, and become…
In an online social network, link recommendations are a way for users to discover relevant links to people they may know, thereby potentially increasing their engagement on the platform. However, the addition of links to a social network…
The proliferation of misinformation on social media has concerning possible consequences, such as the degradation of democratic norms. While recent research on countering misinformation has largely focused on analyzing the effectiveness of…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
Users often make security- and privacy-relevant decisions without a clear understanding of the rules that govern safe behavior. We introduce pedagogical friction, a design approach that inserts brief, instructional interactions at the…
Fake news on Social Media undermines democratic institutions and processes. Especially since 2016, researchers from many disciplines have focussed on ways to address the phenomenon. Much of the research focus to date has been on…