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Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation onlineThe paper shows through six online experiments and a Twitter field trial that simply drawing people's attention to accuracy can substantially reduce their sharing of misinformation. When asked to rate the accuracy of headlines before deciding whether to share them, participants share more accurate content; a Twitter field experiment… Pennycook et al. · Nature · 2021

Detection methodsLLMs & generative AI Belief Evolution Network-based Probability Transformation and FusionThis paper introduces a Belief Evolution Network (BEN) to model the evolution of belief functions and proposes a new Full Causality Probability Transformation (FCPT) method for converting belief mass assignments to probability distributions. The authors also propose FCPT-based fusion rules that outperform traditional Dempster's Rule of… Zhou et al. · arXiv · 2021

LLMs & generative AIDeepfakes & multimodal On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation ModelsA comprehensive 214-page report analyzing foundation models—large neural networks trained on broad data that can be adapted to diverse downstream tasks (BERT, GPT-3, DALL-E). The report maps capabilities across language, vision, and reasoning; applications in healthcare, law, and education; and societal risks including misuse (generating… Bommasani et al. · arXiv · 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 & 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

Platforms, policy & societyBots & coordinated campaigns The Threat of Offensive AI to OrganizationsA comprehensive survey identifying 33 offensive AI capabilities that adversaries can use to attack organizations, organized into seven categories: automation, campaign resilience, credential theft, exploit development, information gathering, social engineering, and stealth. Through a user study with 22 experts from academia and industry,… Mirsky et al. · ACM Computing Surveys · 2021

LLMs & generative AIPlatforms, policy & society Truthful AI: Developing and Governing AI That Does Not LieAs AI systems become more capable and widely deployed, strategic falsehoods—"lies" that AI generates to achieve specified objectives—pose increasing risks. This paper proposes a framework of truthfulness standards for AI systems, governance mechanisms to enforce them (including certification bodies and verification procedures), and… Evans et al. · arXiv · 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

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

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

Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don'tA survey of 1,299 U.S. citizens tests whether four types of media literacy—media, information, news, and digital—predict ability to identify fake news. Only information literacy (the ability to search and evaluate verified sources) significantly improves fake news identification; media, news, and digital literacies showed no significant… Jones-Jang et al. · American Behavioral Scientist · 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

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 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