Related papers: Complexity of the Online Distrust Ecosystem and it…
Misinformation poses a growing global threat to institutional trust, democratic stability, and public decision-making. While prior research has often portrayed social media as a channel for spreading falsehoods, less is known about the…
On February 2, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a COVID-19 social media "infodemic", with special attention to misinformation -- frequently understood as false claims. To understand the infodemic's scope and scale, we analyzed…
The COVID-19 pandemic fueled one of the most rapid vaccine developments in history. However, misinformation spread through online social media often leads to negative vaccine sentiment and hesitancy. To investigate COVID-19 vaccine-related…
Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing…
Misinformation has emerged as a major societal threat in recent years in general; specifically in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has wrecked havoc, for instance, by fuelling vaccine hesitancy. Cost-effective, scalable solutions…
Modern information environments, especially social media, are highly complex systems that exceed individual processing capacities such as humans' limited attention. This environment/cognition mismatch can increase susceptibility to…
Our society is built on a complex web of interdependencies whose effects become manifest during extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with shocks in one system propagating to the others to an exceptional extent. We analyzed…
Information disorders on social media can have a significant impact on citizens' participation in democratic processes. To better understand the spread of false and inaccurate information online, this research analyzed data from Twitter,…
Vaccination is crucial for the control of epidemics. Yet it is a social dilemma since non-vaccinators can benefit from the herd immunity created by the vaccinators. Thus the optimum vaccination level is not reached via voluntary vaccination…
Coordinated campaigns on social media play a critical role in shaping crisis information environments, particularly during the onset of conflicts when uncertainty is high and verified information is scarce. We study the interplay between…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…
Coordinated information operations remain a persistent challenge on social media, despite platform efforts to curb them. While previous research has primarily focused on identifying these operations within individual platforms, this study…
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…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Conventional preventive measures during pandemic include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges - vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used Twitter to disseminate safety guidance and updates, reaching millions of users. This study analyzes two years of tweets from, to, and about the CDC…
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus…
Online social networks are increasingly being utilized for collective sense making and information processing in disasters. However, the underlying mechanisms that shape the dynamics of collective intelligence in online social networks…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…