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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.
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Do politics make us irrational?A 2013 study of 1,100 adults showed that political identity overrides mathematical ability: participants solved identical data-interpretation problems accurately when answers were neutral, but when the correct answer contradicted their political beliefs, even mathematically skilled participants failed. This partisan bias stems from…
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
The dangers of the partisan brainOur brains are shaped by partisan identity to perceive reality differently, even when presented with identical evidence. Research shows that both liberals and conservatives reject factual information that contradicts their political beliefs—a phenomenon driven by motivated reasoning, structural differences in brain architecture, and…
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Can you outsmart a troll (by thinking like one)?Wardle uses a scenario-based approach to teach audiences how disinformation campaigns operate by role-playing as a malicious actor. The video demonstrates a real election disinformation strategy: creating fake accounts, spreading memes, exploiting confirmation bias to suppress opposing voters, making false voting claims, spreading…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Measuring and Reducing Misinformation SusceptibilityJon Roozenbeek presents two major contributions: (1) the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST), a psychometrically validated 20-item measure of how well people distinguish true from false headlines, and (2) findings that video-based inoculation interventions teaching manipulation techniques significantly improve people's ability to…
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…
Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society
When Imperfect Automated Fact-Checking Backfires: Social Learning in the Presence of MisinformationAutomated fact-checking tools are free and fast but error-prone; manual checking is costly but accurate. This paper studies whether adding a free automated tool alongside manual fact-checking improves social welfare (defined as the probability a cascade reaches the correct conclusion).
LLMs & generative AIPlatforms, policy & society
From Leniency to Suspicion: How an Open Post-Training Recipe Changes Whom LLM Fact-Checkers BelievePost-training can introduce social class bias into LLM-based fact-checkers: when the Tülu-3 open post-training recipe is applied to OLMo-2 32B, the model becomes more skeptical of claims from lower-status posters (service workers, manual laborers) while remaining lenient toward claims from higher-status posters (professionals,…
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.…
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)…
Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification
A misinformation playbook sharpens judgement without breeding cynicismThis paper analyzes 214,646 fact-checked claims across 51 languages to map misinformation's persuasion playbook—48 recurring strategies organized under social influence, information manipulation, and emotional appeal. Rather than flagging specific false claims, teaching these meta-strategies improves how both AI models and humans judge…
Detection methodsDatasets & evaluation
Interpretive Variation and Discourse Structure in Detecting Enthymemes in Controversial Political DiscourseEnthymemes (arguments with unstated premises or conclusions) are a persuasion technique in social media that readers may or may not recognize. This paper develops a DeBERTa-based detector on 1,482 tweets about vaccination and immigration, showing that macro-F1 reaches ~0.67 on hard labels but plateaus due to genuine human disagreement.
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.
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…
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…
LLMs & generative AIPsychology & interventions
AI-Enabled Human Memory Manipulation: Misleading AI-Generated Summaries Distort Human MemoryLarge language models frequently generate erroneous summaries of videos, including critical omissions and hallucinated details. In a human-subjects experiment, participants who read AI-generated summaries containing misleading information were significantly less likely to accurately recall the original event—demonstrating that AI…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Why People Believe Misinformation — and What We Can Do About ItJon Roozenbeek synthesizes eight years of misinformation research, examining why people believe false information and what interventions actually work. Grounding the analysis in the historical tobacco disinformation playbook, he argues that misinformation susceptibility stems not primarily from poor reasoning, but from media consumption…
Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification
Psychological Inoculation Against MisinformationSander van der Linden surveys the psychology of misinformation susceptibility and defends the approach of psychological inoculation (pre-bunking) over fact-checking (debunking). He introduces the MIST (Misinformation Susceptibility Test), a psychometrically validated instrument for measuring individual variation in susceptibility to…