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GUIDEUnderstanding fake news, misinformation & disinformation

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Psychology & interventionsDetection methods The Science of MisinformationVan Bavel synthesizes research on misinformation psychology, spread mechanisms, and evidence-based interventions. Misinformation is a persistent global risk (World Economic Forum priority). Van Bavel · 2024 LLMs & generative AIPlatforms, policy & society Measuring Political Bias in Large Language Models: What Is Said and How It Is SaidThis paper proposes a two-tiered framework for measuring political bias in LLM-generated content, separating bias into what is said (content bias) and how it is said (style/framing bias). Using extreme anchor comparison and frame analysis on 11 open-source LLMs across 14 politically divisive topics, the authors find that models exhibit… Bang et al. · arXiv · 2024 Psychology & interventionsLLMs & generative AI From Skepticism to Acceptance: Simulating the Attitude Dynamics Toward Fake NewsThis paper introduces FPS, an LLM-based agent simulation framework that models how individuals' opinions on fake news evolve through social interactions. Each agent has personality traits, dual memory (short- and long-term), and reasoning capabilities. Liu et al. · arXiv · 2024 Psychology & interventionsDetection methods Prebunking Misinformation on Social MediaJon Roozenbeek presents the case for prebunking—teaching people to recognize manipulation tactics before encountering false claims—rather than relying on reactive debunking. Drawing on inoculation theory from the 1960s, he argues that manipulation techniques recur across misinformation campaigns: emotional exploitation, false… Roozenbeek · NNLM Virtual Symposium on Health Misinformation · 2023 Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification Psychological Inoculation Against MisinformationSander van der Linden introduces psychological inoculation as a scalable alternative to fact-checking for building societal resistance to misinformation. Drawing on inoculation theory and his flagship intervention, the Bad News game, he demonstrates how preemptively exposing people to weakened examples of six core manipulation techniques… van der Linden · CPFT Research · 2023 LLMs & generative AIPlatforms, policy & society Toxicity in ChatGPT: Analyzing Persona-assigned Language ModelsLarge-scale empirical analysis of ChatGPT's toxicity across 90 personas using 500K+ generations. Assigning personas via the system parameter increases toxicity up to 6×, with variation depending on persona characteristics and target entities. Deshpande et al. · arXiv · 2023 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social MediaTwitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged and partisan divisive content beyond what users report wanting to see. Through a pre-registered experiment comparing the engagement-based timeline to a reverse-chronological baseline, the authors show the algorithm increases anger, sadness, and out-group… Mills et al. · arXiv · 2023 Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Right-Wing YouTube: A Supply and Demand PerspectiveYouTube has become the dominant platform for right-wing political content in the US, driven by supply-side affordances (low creation barriers, monetization, algorithmic recommendation) and demand-side audience appetite for alternative media. Using longitudinal analysis of creator clusters (Conservative, Alt-Lite, Alt-Right), the authors… Munger & Phillips · The International Journal of Press/Politics · 2022 Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correctionThis comprehensive review establishes that misinformation's power lies not in exposure but in how cognitive, social, and affective factors shape belief formation and persist even after correction. False beliefs arise from intuitive thinking, memory failures, emotional content, in-group bias, and source credibility judgments; corrections… Ecker et al. · Nature Reviews Psychology · 2022 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. Loomba et al. · Nature Human Behaviour · 2021 Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Rumors, Truths, and Reality: Political Misinformation in the Modern DayAdam Berinsky surveys a decade of research on why Americans believe political rumors despite contradictory evidence. He identifies two key mechanisms: conspiratorial thinking (a personality trait that varies across individuals) and partisanship (which structures which rumors a person is likely to endorse). Berinsky · 2021 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 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… Plepi & Flek · arXiv · 2021 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… Clark et al. · arXiv · 2021 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. Nakov et al. · arXiv · 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 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 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 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 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 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… Mosleh et al. · National Academy of Sciences · 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 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 Psychology & interventionsDetection methods The Continued Influence of MisinformationUllrich Ecker presents research on the continued influence effect—the phenomenon that misinformation continues to shape people's reasoning and memory even after they receive corrections and understand them. He examines four social factors that shape this effect: source credibility (trustworthiness matters more than expertise),… Ecker · 2020