Related papers: Complexity of the Online Distrust Ecosystem and it…
Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a {\em disintermediation} weakened consensus on social relevant issues in favor of…
The spread of misinformation poses a threat to the social media ecosystem. Effective countermeasures to mitigate this threat require that social media platforms be able to accurately detect low-credibility accounts even before the content…
Large-scale hazards affect societies not only through direct physical impacts but also through emotions that spread across populations. Fueled by social amplification and networked communication, collective emotions often diverge markedly…
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…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
This study aims at modeling the universal failure in preventing the outbreak of COVID-19 via real-world data from the perspective of complexity and network science. Through formalizing information heterogeneity and government intervention…
Debunking misinformation is an important and time-critical task as there could be adverse consequences when misinformation is not quashed promptly. However, the usual supervised approach to debunking via misinformation classification…
Incorporating social factors into disease prevention and control efforts is an important undertaking of behavioral epidemiology. The interplay between disease transmission and human health behaviors, such as vaccine uptake, results in…
Background: Tools used to appraise the credibility of health information are time-consuming to apply and require context-specific expertise, limiting their use for quickly identifying and mitigating the spread of misinformation as it…
Social media platforms, increasingly used as news sources for varied data analytics, have transformed how information is generated and disseminated. However, the unverified nature of this content raises concerns about trustworthiness and…
Online platforms play a relevant role in the creation and diffusion of false or misleading news. Concerningly, the COVID-19 pandemic is shaping a communication network - barely considered in the literature - which reflects the emergence of…
In 2019, outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases reached the highest number in the US since 1992. Medical misinformation, such as antivaccine content propagating through social media, is associated with increases in vaccine delay and…
Users rely on search engines for information in critical contexts, such as public health emergencies. Understanding how users evaluate the trustworthiness of search results is therefore essential. Research has identified rank and the…
Some political strategies to win elections over the last years were based heavily on fomenting general distrust in information institutions and favoring distrustful sources. The misinformation pandemic has the straightforward consequence…
The "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) movement has created a complex ideological ecosystem within online communities, where advocacy for healthier lifestyles and whole-food diets coexists with vaccine skepticism and anti-science…
Vaccination remains a cornerstone of global public health, yet the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how online misinformation, political polarization, and declining institutional trust can undermine immunization efforts. Most of the prior…
We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…
The rise of social networks as the primary means of communication in almost every country in the world has simultaneously triggered an increase in the amount of fake news circulating online. This fact became particularly evident during the…
Irrespective of the success of the deep learning-based mixed-domain transfer learning approach for solving various Natural Language Processing tasks, it does not lend a generalizable solution for detecting misinformation from COVID-19…
We measure trends in the diffusion of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. We focus on stories from 570 sites that have been identified as producers of false stories. Interactions with these sites on…