Skip to content
GUIDEUnderstanding fake news, misinformation & disinformation

Explore papers

Filter by research area, year and venue. Every filter is in the address bar, so you can share a view as a link.

27 results
CardsList
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 & 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 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 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 LLMs & generative AIDetection methods TextAttack: A Framework for Adversarial Attacks, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training in NLPIntroduces TextAttack, an open-source Python framework unifying 16 adversarial attacks from the literature into a modular architecture for testing and improving NLP model robustness. The framework decomposes attacks into four reusable components (goal function, constraints, transformation, search method), enables benchmarking attacks on… Morris et al. · arXiv · 2020 LLMs & generative AIDetection methods A Survey of the State of Explainable AI for Natural Language ProcessingRecent neural NLP models achieve strong performance but are often opaque. This survey systematically reviews explainable AI (XAI) research in NLP across 50 papers from major conferences (2013–2019), categorizing explanations by scope (local vs. global) and generation (self-explaining vs. post-hoc), detailing five major techniques… Danilevsky et al. · arXiv · 2020 LLMs & generative AIPlatforms, policy & society Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersThis landmark paper introduces GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter autoregressive language model, and demonstrates that it achieves strong performance on diverse NLP tasks through in-context few-shot learning without any task-specific fine-tuning. The model exhibits remarkable scaling properties where larger models dramatically improve… Brown et al. · NeurIPS 2020 · 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 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 Bots & coordinated campaignsDatasets & evaluation A Decade of Social Bot DetectionA comprehensive review of social bot detection research from 2010 to 2020, documenting the evolution from supervised individual-account detection to group-level approaches targeting coordinated inauthentic behavior. The paper traces the escalating "arms race" between bot developers and detection researchers, illustrates bots' documented… Cresci · Communications of the ACM · 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 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 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 Deepfakes & multimodalPlatforms, policy & society Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in NewsExperimental study (N=2,005 UK respondents) testing how political deepfakes affect deception and trust in news. Deepfakes increased uncertainty about content, and that uncertainty mediated reduced trust in news on social media. Vaccari & Chadwick · Social Media + Society · 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 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Online misinformation about climate changeComprehensive literature review examining climate change misinformation from multiple disciplinary angles. Defines misinformation vs. disinformation, identifies networks of actors (scientists, governments, industry, media) spreading false claims, examines how social media characteristics (homophily, echo chambers, algorithmic bias)… Treen et al. · WIREs Climate Change · 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 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 Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society Troll Factories: Manufacturing Specialized Disinformation on TwitterLinvill and Warren analyze 9.04 million tweets from Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) spanning 2009–2018, identifying five specialized account categories—Right Troll, Left Troll, News Feed, Hashtag Gamer, and Fearmonger—each with distinct behavioral patterns, temporal deployment strategies, and communication styles. The authors… Linvill & Warren · Political Communication · 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 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 Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. Presidential ElectionThis paper analyzes 1,052 Russian IRA Twitter accounts to understand their propaganda strategy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. By examining hyperlinks to news stories and YouTube videos, the authors find IRA accounts linked to conservative sources more frequently than liberal ones, consistent with supporting Trump. Golovchenko et al. · The International Journal of Press/Politics · 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 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