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Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USARandomized controlled trial on 8,001 respondents (4,000 UK, 4,001 USA) measuring causal impact of exposure to COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Exposure to misinformation reduced vaccination intent by 6.2 percentage points in the UK and 6.4 in the USA relative to exposure to factual information.
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…
Detection methodsLLMs & generative AI
Perceived and Intended Sarcasm Detection with Graph Attention NetworksSarcasm detection requires understanding both the author's intent and the audience's perception. This work proposes a graph attention network (GAT) that jointly models user historical context and conversational social network information on Twitter, achieving state-of-the-art results on the SPIRS dataset and showing that detecting…
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…
Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation
A Survey on Predicting the Factuality and the Bias of News MediaSurvey of media-level profiling methods for predicting news outlet factuality and political bias. Rather than checking individual claims or articles, the approach profiles entire news sources to enable early detection of unreliable content at publication time.
LLMs & generative AIDatasets & evaluation
All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated TextHuman evaluators cannot reliably distinguish machine-generated text from human-written text without training, focusing instead on superficial features like grammar and style. Three training approaches (instructions, examples, and comparisons) improve evaluator accuracy modestly, with example-based training showing the most improvement…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…