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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 & evaluationDetection methods Fighting an Infodemic: COVID-19 Fake News DatasetThe authors present a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 COVID-19 related posts and articles (52% real, 48% fake) collected from social media and fact-checking websites. They benchmark four machine learning baselines (Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, SVM, Gradient Boost), achieving 93.32% F1-score with SVM, and release both the… Patwa et al. · Springer · 2020 Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19COVID-19 misinformation has proliferated rapidly on social media, undermining public health responses and vaccination uptake. Rather than relying on post-hoc fact-checking (which spreads slower than misinformation), the authors propose psychological inoculation—exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation techniques beforehand to… van der Linden et al. · Frontiers in Psychology · 2020 Fact-checking & verificationDetection methods Where Are the Facts? Searching for Fact-checked Information to Alleviate the Spread of Fake NewsProposes a framework to automatically find fact-checking articles that address claims in original tweets. Uses a multimodal attention network (MAN) combining textual and visual content from tweets with fact-checking article text to rank candidate fact-checks; demonstrates that multimodal retrieval substantially outperforms text-only… Vo & Lee · arXiv · 2020 Deepfakes & multimodalFact-checking & verification A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies? The Effects and Mechanisms of Multimodal Disinformation and Rebuttals Disseminated via Social MediaMultimodal disinformation (paired text and images) is perceived as more credible than text-only misinformation, but fact-checkers can overcome this effect. Importantly, the modality of fact-checks (visual or textual) matters less than their presence; fact-checks are more persuasive for people whose prior attitudes already oppose the… Hameleers et al. · Political Communication · 2020 Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and IndiaA randomized experiment tests Facebook's "Tips to Spot False News" intervention in the US and India, finding it increases discernment between mainstream and false news (26.5% in US, 17.3% in India online). The intervention reduces belief in false headlines more than it reduces belief in mainstream ones. Guess et al. · PNAS · 2020 Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society Fact-checking as risk communication: the multi-layered risk of misinformation in times of COVID-19COVID-19 misinformation should be viewed as a risk in its own right, not just a communication failure. Fact-checking efforts face three key challenges: defining misinformation differently across political subgroups, earning trust in an environment of low press credibility, and communicating amid genuine uncertainty. Krause et al. · Journal of Risk Research · 2020 Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge InterventionTwo pre-registered experiments with 1,700+ U.S. adults show that a simple accuracy nudge — asking people to rate the accuracy of an unrelated headline before the main task — nearly tripled their ability to discriminate true from false COVID-19 headlines when deciding what to share on social media. The intervention is scalable, requires… Pennycook et al. · Psychological Science · 2020 Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the worldAn international survey of 3,750 adults across five countries (UK, Ireland, USA, Spain, Mexico) measured susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation and examined how it predicts public health behaviors. While majorities in each country did not find COVID-19 misinformation credible, higher susceptibility to misinformation was strongly… Roozenbeek et al. · Royal Society Open Science · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Causes and consequences of mainstream media dissemination of fake news: literature review and synthesisWhile fake news websites have limited direct reach, mainstream media coverage is probably how most people encounter fake news stories. This synthesis identifies why mainstream outlets cover falsehoods (journalists' professional duties, news values, peer psychology, technical infrastructure) and explores how mainstream coverage amplifies… Tsfati et al. · Annals of the International Communication… · 2020 Fact-checking & verificationPsychology & interventions Fact-Checking: A Meta-Analysis of What Works and for WhomMeta-analysis of 30 studies on fact-checking effectiveness finds modest but significant positive effects (d = 0.29) on belief correction. However, effects are substantially moderated by motivated reasoning, political ideology, message design, and context: pro-attitudinal fact-checking works better than counter-attitudinal corrections,… Walter et al. · Political Communication · 2020 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks Social media and vaccine hesitancyLarge-scale cross-national analysis finds that social media use to organize offline action predicts public vaccine safety skepticism, while foreign disinformation campaigns significantly reduce vaccination coverage year-over-year. A one-point increase on the five-point disinformation scale correlates with a two-percentage-point drop in… Wilson & Wiysonge · BMJ Global Health · 2020 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential electionUsing 171 million tweets from the five months preceding the 2016 U.S. election, this study found that 25% of news-sharing tweets contained fake or extremely biased content. Network analysis revealed distinct clusters of fake, biased, and mainstream news spreaders. Bovet & Makse · Nature Communications · 2019 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks How You Can Help Transform the Internet into a Place of TrustWardle examines the systemic challenges of moderating harmful content at internet scale while preserving freedom of expression. She argues that the core problem is not technical (AI could theoretically detect violations) but structural: platforms and governments lack clear authority to decide what constitutes harmful speech, face… Wardle · 2019 Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of ClaimsMultiFC is the largest publicly available real-world dataset of naturally occurring factual claims (34,918 claims) collected from 26 fact-checking websites, with rich metadata, evidence pages retrieved via Google Search, and entity linking to Wikipedia. The paper demonstrates that evidence ranking combined with veracity prediction… Augenstein et al. · arXiv · 2019 Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation A Richly Annotated Corpus for Different Tasks in Automated Fact-CheckingThe paper introduces SNOPES, a large-scale fact-checking corpus with 6,422 validated claims and 14,296 documents covering multiple domains (news, social media, blogs). Each claim is annotated with evidence text snippets, evidence stance (support/refute/no stance), and verdicts, enabling training of models for four core fact-checking… Hanselowski et al. · arXiv · 2019 Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society Multi-Task Ordinal Regression for Jointly Predicting the Trustworthiness and the Leading Political Ideology of News MediaRather than predicting media bias and trustworthiness separately, this paper jointly models both as ordinal regression tasks using Copula Ordinal Regression. The intuition is that hyper-partisan outlets tend to be less trustworthy, while centrist outlets are more factual. Baly et al. · arXiv · 2019 Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation RumourEval 2019: Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for RumoursRumourEval 2019 is a shared task for rumour stance detection and veracity prediction on social media. Extending the 2017 edition, it introduces Reddit data alongside Twitter, provides datasets annotated for SDQC stance (Support/Deny/Query/Comment) and three-way veracity labels, and received 22 system submissions showing that modern… Gorrell et al. · 13th International Workshop on Semantic… · 2019 Datasets & evaluationSpread & networks NELA-GT-2018: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News ArticlesNELA-GT-2018 is a large, engagement-independent collection of 713,534 news articles from 194 sources across 10 months (Feb–Nov 2018). It combines multi-source-level ground truth labels from eight independent assessment sites (NewsGuard, Pew Research, Wikipedia, OpenSources, Media Bias/Fact Check, AllSides, BuzzFeed News, PolitiFact)… Nørregaard et al. · arXiv · 2019 Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks Cognitive attraction and online misinformationMisinformation spreads not because it is low-quality information constrained by digital media inefficiencies, but because it taps into general evolved cognitive preferences. A content analysis of 260 articles from 26 hoax websites shows that 86% contain at least one cognitive-appeal feature: negative framing (49%), threat descriptions… Acerbi · Palgrave Communications · 2019 Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society Fighting Misperceptions and Doubting Journalists' Objectivity: A Review of Fact-checking LiteratureComprehensive literature review of 48 studies on political fact-checking, organized into three research areas: (1) fact-checking effectiveness for correcting misperceptions (mixed results, including backfire effects); (2) fact-checking as a profession (contested methods and reliability); (3) public opinion about fact-checking (mostly… Nieminen & Rapeli · Political Studies Review · 2019 Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification Why People Believe Fake News, Myths & Conspiracy TheoriesBrendan Nyhan surveys research on why people hold false beliefs about politics, health, and conspiracy theories despite exposure to corrective information. He identifies two core mechanisms: selective exposure (people seek out information matching their worldview) and selective acceptance (people dismiss contradictory information through… Nyhan · 2018 Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation Predicting Factuality of Reporting and Bias of News Media SourcesThis paper frames predicting news media factuality and bias as classification tasks at the news outlet level rather than at the claim or article level. The authors extract 141 features from multiple sources (articles, Wikipedia, Twitter, URL structure, web traffic) and train SVM classifiers, creating a dataset of 1,066 websites manually… Baly et al. · arXiv · 2018