Related papers: Misleading Ourselves: How Disinformation Manipulat…
Following the 2016 US presidential election and the now overwhelming evidence of Russian interference, there has been an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of "fake news". To date, research on false news has centered around detecting…
This article revisits the widely studied problem of disinformation and related phenomena in online social networks (OSNs) by reframing it as a broader problem of misrepresentation. While disinformation is commonly understood as the…
In the 21st Century information environment, adversarial actors use disinformation to manipulate public opinion. The distribution of false, misleading, or inaccurate information with the intent to deceive is an existential threat to the…
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…
Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
During community decision-making and civic collaboration, conflicts can escalate when people suspect misinformation. We introduce the concept of sense of misinformation as experiencing someone's language or behavior as misinformation when…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Older adults habitually encounter misinformation on social media, but there is little knowledge about their experiences with it. In this study, we combined a qualitative survey (n=119) with in-depth interviews (n=21) to investigate how…
Disinformation research has proliferated in reaction to widespread false, problematic beliefs purported to explain major social phenomena. Yet while the effects of disinformation are well-known, there is less consensus about its causes; the…
Advances in large language models have raised concerns about their potential use in generating compelling election disinformation at scale. This study presents a two-part investigation into the capabilities of LLMs to automate stages of an…
The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics…
For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
Disinformation, irrespective of domain or language, aims to deceive or manipulate public opinion, typically through employing advanced persuasion techniques. Qualitative and quantitative research on the weaponisation of persuasion…
Over the past decade it has become evident that intentional disinformation in the political context -- so-called fake news -- is a danger to democracy. However, until now there has been no clear understanding of how to define fake news,…
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…
The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election unfolded within an information environment of unprecedented volatility, challenging citizens to navigate a torrent of rapidly evolving, often contradictory information while determining what to believe.…
Technology is increasingly used -- unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) -- to spread false information at scale, with potentially broad-reaching societal effects. For example, technology enables increasingly…
We present a generalizable AI-assisted framework for rapidly generating effective "prebunking" interventions against misinformation. Like mRNA vaccine platforms, our approach uses a stable template structure that can be quickly adapted to…