Related papers: Complexity of the Online Distrust Ecosystem and it…
Why is distrust (e.g. of medical expertise) now flourishing online despite the surge in mitigation schemes being implemented? We analyze the changing discourse in the Facebook ecosystem of approximately 100 million users who pre-pandemic…
Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children, and likely also when advising other family members such as elderly relatives. Minimizing malignant online…
We present preliminary results on the online war surrounding distrust of expertise in medical science -- specifically, the issue of vaccinations. While distrust and misinformation in politics can damage democratic elections, in the medical…
With the rapid increase in access to internet and the subsequent growth in the population of online social media users, the quality of information posted, disseminated and consumed via these platforms is an issue of growing concern. A large…
Anti-vaccination views pervade online social media, fueling distrust in scientific expertise and increasing vaccine-hesitant individuals. While previous studies focused on specific countries, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the vaccination…
Misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest. Vaccine misinformation, in particular, has stalled efforts to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting social media platforms' attempts to…
The proliferation of online misinformation has emerged as one of the biggest threats to society. Considerable efforts have focused on building misinformation detection models, still the perils of misinformation remain abound. Mitigating…
What has been the impact of the enormous amounts of time, effort and money spent promoting pro-vaccine science from pre-COVID-19 to now? We answer this using a unique mapping of online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views…
Research into COVID-19 has been rapidly evolving since the onset of the pandemic. This occasionally results in contradictory recommendations by credible sources of scientific opinion, public health authorities, and medical professionals. In…
Understanding how misinformation affects the spread of disease is crucial for public health, especially given recent research indicating that misinformation can increase vaccine hesitancy and discourage vaccine uptake. However, it is…
The global spread of the novel coronavirus is affected by the spread of related misinformation -- the so-called COVID-19 Infodemic -- that makes populations more vulnerable to the disease through resistance to mitigation efforts. Here we…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has increased concerns about vaccine uptake required to overcome the pandemic and protect public health. A critical factor associated with anti-vaccine attitudes is the information shared on social media. In this…
The breakdown of trusted sources of information is probably one of the most serious problems today, since in the absence of a common ground, it will be impossible to address the problems that trouble our contemporary world. The Covid-19…
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a…
Detecting misinformation threads is crucial to guarantee a healthy environment on social media. We address the problem using the data set created during the COVID-19 pandemic. It contains cascades of tweets discussing information weakly…
Misleading newsletters can shape individuals' perceptions, and pose a threat to societies; as we witnessed by lowering the severity of follow-up stay-at-home orders and burdening a significant challenge to the fight against COVID-19. In…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the subject of a vast amount of misinformation, particularly in digital information environments, and major social media platforms recently publicized some of the countermeasures they are adopting. This…
Social media platforms have had considerable impact on the real world especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Misinformation related to Covid-19 might have caused significant impact on the population specifically due to its association…
COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users…