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GUIDEUnderstanding fake news, misinformation & disinformation

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Cascades, echo chambers, polarization, and how false news travels.

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Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Fear Doesn't Go Viral, It Lingers: Spread, Affect, and Discourse of Food-Fear Content on TikTokFear-based content about food on TikTok reaches fewer people than non-fear nutrition videos but sustains engagement and discussion far longer. Fear videos trigger more negative, angry, and disgusted comments that persist for weeks; their discourse concentrates on distrust of food industry, contamination, and institutional skepticism. Shin et al. · The Web Conference · 2027 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks Investigating Media Manipulation and DisinformationResearchers at Harvard Kennedy School present frameworks and practical tools for investigating online media manipulation. Joan Donovan introduces mediammanipulation.org's encyclopedia of manipulation tactics and a detailed case study of how the COVID lab-leak disinformation campaign exploited academic preprint archives. Donovan · 2026 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks Algorithmic Intervention Decreases Polarization in Content ModerationX's Community Notes transitioned from simple majority voting to a bridging algorithm that rewards agreement across ideologically diverse contributors. Comparing 8,805 notes and 4,367 contributors before and after this change (July 2021–September 2022), ideological polarization in both contributor and note positions decreased… Bertani et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society New Election, Same Old Story: How Tropes Form a Grammar of Election RumorsElection rumors follow recurring narrative patterns organized as a three-layer framework: meta-categories (actors, objects, actions, scenes, remedies) that combine into meso-tropes (villain, conspiracy, etc.), which manifest as micro-tropes (specific claims about mail voting, machines, etc.). Analysis of 590 rumors from 2020–2022 U.S.… Prochaska et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksDetection methods Where Does Rhetorical Distortion Live? A Multi-Platform, Multi-Language Measurement of Influencer ContentRhetorical distortion—misleading framing that inflates significance, manufactures anxiety, or misrepresents novelty—is not uniformly distributed across platforms or account types. This work measures five linguistic dimensions of distortion (Significance Inflation, Anxiety Manufacture, Novelty Claims, Loaded Language, Temporal Distortion)… Yu et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation Friends as Sensors: High-Sensitivity Monitoring of Misinformation and Platform Dynamics via the Friendship ParadoxThe friendship paradox—a network property where a user's friends are, on average, better connected than the user themselves—enables high-sensitivity monitoring of misinformation on Twitter/X. Comparing ~27 million tweets from randomly selected users to ~31 million from accounts those users retweet (the "sensors"), the authors find: (1)… Angermaier et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksPsychology & interventions Conspiracy and Environment Communities on Reddit Sort Along Different Demographic AxesConspiracy and environmental communities on Reddit exhibit distinct demographic sorting mechanisms. Conspiracy communities show upstream sorting—users self-segregate by gender and partisanship before entry through ideologically-aligned information environments. Sánchez-Cortés et al. · arXiv · 2026 Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks Birds of a Feather Flock Together: Network-Based Detection of Coordinated Disinformation Campaigns on TelegramA graph-based methodology discovers coordinated disinformation campaigns on Telegram by analyzing message-sharing patterns rather than content, requiring only structural relationships. The authors identified 55 disinformation channels and over 86,000 identical message chains spanning multiple channels, revealing a highly synchronized… Tsagkarakis et al. · SECRYPT · 2026 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Two Fault Lines: Latent Polarity Geometry in X Community NotesX's Community Notes system assumes disagreement is one-dimensional (left/right politics) to decide when notes should be published via a "bridging" mechanism. This paper shows the space is actually two-dimensional: the first axis captures political polarization, while a second axis independently captures disagreement on topics like… Andreou & Sirivianos · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Strategic Opinion Manipulation in Multiplex NetworksThis paper models how agents strategically manipulate consensus when opinions are aggregated across multiple platforms or channels. By analyzing the resulting game as a DeGroot-like process on merged layers with strategic misreporting costs, the authors show that merging layers dilutes manipulation by default—but can amplify it through… Ebrahimi & Franceschetti · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Why Does Misinformation Propagate Faster? An Algorithmic Perspective on XMisinformation propagates faster on X due to an "engagement fungibility mechanism" in the platform's score-aggregation layer: fast engagement signals (likes, retweets) are treated as interchangeable evidence of quality with slow signals (replies, quotes), allowing low-credibility content that draws disproportionately from instant… Li & Gao · arXiv · 2026 Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks Unifying Models of Intergroup Hostility in Online DiscourseHostile rhetoric toward outgroups in online discourse can be modeled through six mechanisms (boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, action orientation) whose structural and temporal relationships were previously understood separately through competing theoretical frameworks. By… Gerard et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksPsychology & interventions How neighbourhood ideology shapes misinformation belief in densely tied social networksPrior work decouples ideological bias and social influence when modeling misinformation propagation; this paper integrates them through an agent-based contagion model that distinguishes an individual's ideological intensity from a claim's ideological alignment. Simulation and analytical results show that in densely clustered… Karimi et al. · arXiv · 2026 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks Control-Theoretic Content ModerationContent moderation at the platform level requires balancing multiple competing objectives (reducing harmful content, preserving engagement, maintaining activity). This paper formulates platform-level moderation as a feedback control problem with a multi-objective loss function, proposes control-theoretic moderators (including… Tessa et al. · arXiv · 2026 Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks Social bots weaken activist cohesionSocial bots during protest peaks weaken the human relational infrastructure of activism. Analyzing 2.5M tweets from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the authors show that networks more exposed to bot infiltration suffered steeper declines in human cohesion (triadic closure and edge density) after the peak, with effects concentrated… Li et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksLLMs & generative AI One AI Signal, Many Human Judgments: A Bayesian Cascade Analysis of AI-based Credibility Indicators in Online Information SpreadSocial media platforms increasingly deploy AI-based credibility indicators to help users judge misinformation. This paper extends classical Bayesian cascade models to treat AI credibility signals as a shared public signal seen by all users, then derives a critical "Gateway" threshold: above it, AI predictions dominate the public record;… Lu et al. · arXiv · 2026 Detection methodsPsychology & interventions A Multi-Branch Feature Fusion Approach for Health Misinformation Detection and PropagationThe paper presents a multi-branch fusion framework for detecting and characterizing health misinformation on social media, grounded in psychological theories (Elaboration Likelihood Model and Theory of Planned Behaviour). The model fuses transformer embeddings with rhetorical, stance, and theory-motivated linguistic features in a unified… Sikosana et al. · IEEE Access · 2026 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Quantifying Political Partisanship for Cross-Platform AnalysesPolitical partisanship measurement in social media typically relies on platform-specific features (follower networks, community structure), making cross-platform comparison difficult. This work proposes a text-based partisanship measurement method grounded in external media bias ratings, and validates it on ~1.3 million posts from… Ameen & Healey · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksPsychology & interventions Modeling Duelling Contagions of True and False Information in the Face of Inherent Individual biasesThis paper proposes CI-SRW, an agent-based co-diffusion model integrating cognitive biases with network dynamics to explain how competing true and false information spread in social media. Using behavioral experiments and simulations, the authors find that manipulative narratives dominate when early spreaders hold them, cognitive biases… Krishna et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksDetection methods Network Information Enhances Unreliable News Domain DetectionContent-based detection of unreliable news is increasingly difficult as low-reliability sources mimic credible journalism. The authors show that network structure—how domains co-occur in social networks—can improve news-domain reliability classification. Kefler et al. · arXiv · 2026 Spread & networksDetection methods Spectral Analysis of Fake News PropagationThe paper develops a spectral view of fake news propagation by connecting graph spectra with structural properties of propagation trees. The authors derive spectral bounds capturing five key aspects of cascade structure—branching capacity, cascade scale, structural cohesion, propagation span, and diffusion dynamics—and use them as graph… Cai & Zafarani · SIAM · 2026 Psychology & interventionsLLMs & generative AI From Skepticism to Acceptance: Simulating the Attitude Dynamics Toward Fake NewsThis paper introduces FPS, an LLM-based agent simulation framework that models how individuals' opinions on fake news evolve through social interactions. Each agent has personality traits, dual memory (short- and long-term), and reasoning capabilities. Liu et al. · arXiv · 2024 Platforms, policy & societyLLMs & generative AI Disinformation 2.0 in the Age of AI: A Cybersecurity PerspectiveDisinformation should be treated as a cybersecurity threat, particularly as AI advances enable its creation and dissemination at unprecedented scale. The paper introduces "disinformation 2.0"—where generative AI, perturbation techniques, detection evasion, and optimized spread strategies make false content more persuasive and harder to… Mazurczyk et al. · ACM Publication · 2023 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social MediaTwitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged and partisan divisive content beyond what users report wanting to see. Through a pre-registered experiment comparing the engagement-based timeline to a reverse-chronological baseline, the authors show the algorithm increases anger, sadness, and out-group… Mills et al. · arXiv · 2023 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society The Amplification Paradox in Recommender SystemsAlgorithmic audits find that blindly following YouTube recommendations leads to extreme content, yet real user logs show recommendations don't drive extreme content consumption. Using an agent-based model with realistic user preferences, the authors show this paradox arises because users rarely consume niche content even when recommended… Ribeiro et al. · ICWSM · 2023 Spread & networksDetection methods The Evolution of Distributed Systems for Graph Neural Networks and their Origin in Graph Processing and Deep Learning: A SurveyThis survey systematically examines distributed systems for scalable GNN training, bridging graph processing systems (Pregel, PowerGraph, GraphLab) and DNN training systems (TensorFlow, PyTorch) to show how techniques from both domains inform GNN system design. The paper categorizes methods across partitioning, sampling, communication,… Vatter et al. · arXiv · 2023 Spread & networksDetection methods "This is Fake! Shared it by Mistake": Assessing the Intent of Fake News SpreadersThis work is the first to systematically assess whether individuals spread fake news intentionally or unintentionally. The authors propose an influence graph that captures psychological (internal) and social (external) factors driving unintentional spreading, validate it on two datasets with manually-annotated spreader intent, and… Zhou et al. · ACM Web Conference 2022 · 2022 Detection methodsDatasets & evaluation From Fake News to #FakeNews: Mining Direct and Indirect Relationships among Hashtags for Fake News DetectionHashtags reveal news credibility signals during propagation: fake news clusters with hashtags used primarily for misinformation, while true news uses hashtags associated with reliable content. The authors propose NewsTag, a language-independent semi-supervised algorithm that mines both direct co-occurrence and indirect relationships… Zhou et al. · ACM Conference · 2022 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Right-Wing YouTube: A Supply and Demand PerspectiveYouTube has become the dominant platform for right-wing political content in the US, driven by supply-side affordances (low creation barriers, monetization, algorithmic recommendation) and demand-side audience appetite for alternative media. Using longitudinal analysis of creator clusters (Conservative, Alt-Lite, Alt-Right), the authors… Munger & Phillips · The International Journal of Press/Politics · 2022 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks How to Demolish the Disinformation InfrastructureKate Starbird, co-principal investigator at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, discusses the state of disinformation in the aftermath of platform removals (Trump, QAnon), focusing on how moderation actions redirect harmful activity to alternative ("alt-tech") platforms rather than eliminating it. She emphasizes… Starbird · The Open Mind · 2021 Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic ReviewSystematic review of 69 studies examining health misinformation prevalence across social media platforms. Vaccines, drugs, and smoking are the most-studied topics; Twitter is the primary platform for misinformation about smoking and substances, while vaccines are discussed broadly across platforms. Suarez-Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez · Journal of Medical Internet Research · 2021 Spread & networksDetection methods Causal Understanding of Fake News Dissemination on Social MediaThe paper addresses the fundamental causal question: what user attributes cause susceptibility to share fake news? Rather than observing correlations, the authors use inverse propensity scoring (IPS) to learn unbiased embeddings of fake news sharing behavior, treating these embeddings as confounders in a causal model. Cheng et al. · ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery… · 2021 Detection methodsSpread & networks User Preference-aware Fake News DetectionProposes UPFD, which detects fake news by jointly modeling user endogenous preferences (from historical posts) and exogenous context (news propagation graphs) via GNNs. Shows confirmation bias drives news sharing decisions, and historical user behavior provides complementary signals to improve detection over content-only and graph-only… Dou et al. · SIGIR 2021 · 2021 Spread & networksPsychology & interventions The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical InformationThis paper systematically studies the QAnon conspiracy theory by collecting and analyzing 4,961 unique Q drops from six aggregation sites. The authors find that aggregation sites show poor agreement on what constitutes a canonical Q drop, that Q drops are incoherent and low-quality relative to other social media platforms, and that… Papasavva et al. · 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and… · 2021 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic ReviewThis systematic review of 69 studies characterizes health misinformation topics and their prevalence across social media platforms. Health misinformation was most prevalent on Twitter regarding smoking and drugs; vaccines, noncommunicable diseases, and pandemics were also common topics. Suarez-Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez · Journal of Medical Internet Research · 2021 Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation A Survey of Information Cascade Analysis: Models, Predictions, and Recent AdvancesThis comprehensive survey systematizes research on predicting information cascade growth and structure across social networks, covering feature-based models, generative models, and deep learning approaches. It provides a taxonomy of prediction methods across temporal, structural, user/item, and content features; evaluation metrics and… Zhou et al. · ACM Computing Surveys · 2021 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society The echo chamber effect on social mediaComparative analysis of 100+ million posts across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Gab on controversial topics shows echo chambers operate differently by platform: Facebook and Twitter exhibit strong homophilic clustering and polarized information diffusion, while Reddit and Gab show single-sided communities without the biased diffusion… Cinelli et al. · National Academy of Sciences · 2021 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTubeLarge-scale study of 309,813 U.S. users' YouTube and web browsing from 2016–2019 finds that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream, centrist sources. While far-right content exists and engages users intensely, it remains a small and stable share. Hosseinmardi et al. · PNAS · 2021 Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on TwitterHigh scorers on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT)—a measure of analytical thinking—are more discerning social media users: they follow fewer accounts, share news from more reliable sources, and engage more with substantive topics like politics. The study identifies "cognitive echo chambers" where low-CRT users preferentially follow… Mosleh et al. · Nature Communications · 2021 Spread & networksPsychology & interventions Shared partisanship dramatically increases social tie formation in a Twitter field experimentA Twitter field experiment with bot accounts reveals that shared partisanship causally drives social tie formation: users were nearly three times more likely to reciprocally follow accounts matching their political party, regardless of the account's partisan intensity. Critically, this preference was symmetric—Democrats and Republicans… Mosleh et al. · National Academy of Sciences · 2021 Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks News literacy, social media behaviors, and skepticism toward information on social mediaA national survey of 788 Americans examines how news literacy relates to what people see and share on social media, and whether it predicts skepticism toward information shared in these spaces. The key finding: people with higher news literacy see and post less political content on social media, but when they do engage, they're… Vraga & Tully · Information, Communication & Society · 2021 Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society Types, Sources, and Claims of COVID-19 MisinformationSystematic analysis of 225 fact-checked COVID-19 misinformation pieces reveals that most false content reconfigures existing information (59%) rather than fabricating entirely new claims. Public authorities are cited in 39% of misinformation, yet top-down claims from politicians and celebrities account for only 20% of volume but drive… Brennen et al. · Reuters Institute for the Study of… · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Assessing the risks of 'infodemics' in response to COVID-19 epidemicsAnalysis of 112+ million geolocated Twitter messages about COVID-19 (January–March 2020) across 64 languages and countries. Develops an infodemic risk index (IRI) measuring exposure to unreliable news; demonstrates that waves of unreliable information precede pandemic waves, providing early-warning signals for policy intervention. Gallotti et al. · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US electionUsing combined survey and web-traffic data from the 2016 US presidential election, Guess et al. found that while 44.3% of Americans aged 18+ visited an untrustworthy website during the campaign, actual exposure was highly concentrated among Trump supporters (56.7% of Trump supporters vs. 27.7% of Clinton supporters). Facebook played a… Guess et al. · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case StudiesThis paper proposes a general, unsupervised, network-based methodology to detect coordinated inauthentic behavior on social media. The approach identifies behavioral traces (handle changes, image sharing, hashtag sequences, co-retweets, synchronized actions) and constructs bipartite networks to discover clusters of accounts likely… Pacheco et al. · ICWSM · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on TwitterEarly-pandemic analysis of 21 million COVID-19 tweets showing Twitter conversations predict case increases by 2–5 days; identifies five prevalent myths (origin, flu comparison, heat, home remedies, vaccine) accounting for ~0.6% of tweets; finds most shared URLs point to reputable sources (CDC, WHO) rather than misinformation sites,… Singh et al. · arXiv · 2020 Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns On the Detection of Disinformation Campaign Activity with Network AnalysisState-sponsored disinformation campaigns on Twitter exhibit distinct coordination patterns (shared messages, hashtags, URLs, retweet cascades) that differ from legitimate coordinated activity. The paper proposes using coordination network features—extracted from daily account interactions—to train a binary classifier that detects… Vargas et al. · Cloud Computing Security Workshop · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society The Hype MachineA book talk by MIT's Sinan Aral on "The Hype Machine," which explores how social media simultaneously disrupts elections, the economy, and public health while offering tremendous potential for good. The presentation synthesizes 20 years of research on social media diffusion, arguing that misinformation spreads faster than truth because… Aral · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Mis- and Disinformation During Crisis EventsKate Starbird, associate professor at UW's HCDE and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, discusses how misinformation and disinformation spread during crisis events, with case studies from the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 election. She distinguishes between harmful misinformation (false but well-intentioned), disinformation… Starbird · University of Washington · 2020 Datasets & evaluationSpread & networks A large-scale COVID-19 Twitter chatter dataset for open scientific research - an international collaborationBanda et al. release a massive curated corpus of 800+ million COVID-19–related tweets collected from January through November 2020, with deduplication and language diversity. The dataset adheres to FAIR principles and provides both raw tweets and metadata (terms, bigrams, trigrams, hashtags, emojis, mentions) to support research on… Banda et al. · arXiv · 2020 Spread & networksDetection methods What Was Written vs. Who Read It: News Media Profiling Using Text Analysis and Social Media ContextThis paper predicts the political bias (left/center/right) and factuality (low/mixed/high) of news outlets by analyzing what articles they publish, who follows them on social media, and what Wikipedia says about them. The system achieves 85% accuracy on bias prediction by combining article text, YouTube video features, Twitter audience… Baly et al. · 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for… · 2020 Spread & networksDetection methods Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional NetworksProposes Bi-GCN, a graph convolutional network approach for rumor detection that models both top-down propagation patterns (how rumors spread from source) and bottom-up dispersion patterns (how rumors diffuse within communities). By capturing both directional characteristics jointly and incorporating source post features at each layer,… Bian et al. · AAAI 2020 · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society The COVID-19 Social Media InfodemicComparative analysis of COVID-19 information diffusion across five social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Gab) using epidemic models. All platforms exhibit infodemic characteristics (basic reproduction number R₀ 1), with platform-dependent differences in how misinformation spreads relative to reliable information. Cinelli et al. · arXiv · 2020 Datasets & evaluationSpread & networks CoAID: COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation DatasetCoAID is a benchmark dataset for COVID-19 healthcare misinformation detection comprising 4,251 news articles (204 fake, 3,565 true), 28 fake claims and 454 true claims, 296,000 user engagements from social platforms, and 926 social media posts with ground-truth labels. The dataset bridges text content, user engagement features, and… Cui & Lee · arXiv · 2020 Datasets & evaluationSpread & networks Characterizing COVID-19 Misinformation Communities Using a Novel Twitter DatasetThis paper presents CMU-MisCOV19, a manually annotated Twitter dataset of 4,573 COVID-19 tweets across 17 categories, and characterizes misinformed versus informed online communities. Key findings: misinformed communities are significantly denser (higher network density), contain more bots (19% vs 11%), and demonstrate higher… Memon & Carley · arXiv · 2020 Detection methodsSpread & networks A Survey on Computational Propaganda DetectionThis survey comprehensively reviews computational propaganda detection from two complementary perspectives: text analysis (NLP) and network analysis. The authors argue that propaganda differs from misinformation/disinformation by focusing on persuasion techniques (emotional appeals, logical fallacies) rather than falsity. San Martino et al. · arXiv · 2020 Detection methodsSpread & networks Mining Disinformation and Fake News: Concepts, Methods, and Recent AdvancementsThis comprehensive tutorial surveys the landscape of fake news and disinformation research across three dimensions: understanding user engagement in information disorder, techniques for detecting and mitigating false content, and emerging challenges like fake news literacy and neural generation. The authors emphasize weak social… Shu et al. · Book chapter · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystemUsing nationally representative data on mobile, desktop, and TV consumption spanning 2016–2018, the authors show that fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet, while TV dominates news consumption by a 5:1 ratio over online. The paper challenges the widespread narrative of fake news as a pervasive crisis and suggests… Allen et al. · Science Advances · 2020 Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and ShareFour preregistered experiments (N=2,587) show that repeatedly encountering fake-news headlines reduces moral condemnation of spreading them—regardless of whether people believe them. This "moral repetition effect" operates via fluency: familiar headlines feel less unethical to share, stronger inclinations to promote them online, and… Effron & Raj · Psychological Science · 2020 Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian electionsCoordinated networks of Facebook pages and groups substantially amplified problematic news during Italian elections: coordinated entities shared problematic domains 1.79×–2.22× more frequently than uncoordinated ones. The paper introduces a method to detect "coordinated inauthentic behavior" by identifying entities that… Giglietto et al. · Information, Communication & Society · 2020
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