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Deepfakes & multimodalPlatforms, policy & society
How deepfakes undermine truth and threaten democracyDeepfakes use machine-learning technology to create fabricated audio and video of people doing or saying things they never did. Law professor Danielle Citron explores the dual threats: individual harm (non-consensual sexual deepfakes targeting women, especially minorities and journalists) and societal damage (eroding trust in…
Platforms, policy & societyPsychology & interventions
Inside the bizarre world of internet trolls and propagandistsJournalist Andrew Marantz spent three years investigating propagandists and online extremists, tracing how fringe conspiracy theories and hate speech go viral on social media platforms. He exposes how social media algorithms optimized for engagement enable propagandists to leverage emotion over truth, and documents the pipeline through…
Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society
Multi-Task Ordinal Regression for Jointly Predicting the Trustworthiness and the Leading Political Ideology of News MediaRather than predicting media bias and trustworthiness separately, this paper jointly models both as ordinal regression tasks using Copula Ordinal Regression. The intuition is that hyper-partisan outlets tend to be less trustworthy, while centrist outlets are more factual.
Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks
Cognitive attraction and online misinformationMisinformation spreads not because it is low-quality information constrained by digital media inefficiencies, but because it taps into general evolved cognitive preferences. A content analysis of 260 articles from 26 hoax websites shows that 86% contain at least one cognitive-appeal feature: negative framing (49%), threat descriptions…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media? Evidence From Linked Survey and Twitter DataEady et al. link survey data from 1,496 Americans to Twitter data from 642,345 accounts and ~1.2 billion tweets to measure political polarization in media consumption. Rather than finding evidence of extreme "filter bubbles" where most people consume ideologically homogeneous content, they find substantial overlap in the accounts…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential electionFake news consumption on Twitter during the 2016 election was extremely concentrated: only 1% of users saw 80% of exposures, and 0.1% shared 80% of fake news. Conservative-leaning, older, highly politically engaged users drove most consumption.
Spread & networksPsychology & interventions
Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on FacebookFake news dissemination on Facebook during the 2016 election was a rare behavior (8.5% of users shared at least one article), with clear demographic stratification: conservatives shared more articles from fake news domains (pro-Trump), but the strongest and most robust predictor was age—users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many…
Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society
Fighting Misperceptions and Doubting Journalists' Objectivity: A Review of Fact-checking LiteratureComprehensive literature review of 48 studies on political fact-checking, organized into three research areas: (1) fact-checking effectiveness for correcting misperceptions (mixed results, including backfire effects); (2) fact-checking as a profession (contested methods and reliability); (3) public opinion about fact-checking (mostly…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Social Media for Political Campaigns: An Examination of Trump's and Clinton's Frame Building and Its Effect on Audience EngagementThis study analyzes how Trump and Clinton's 2016 campaigns framed messages on Twitter and Facebook, and how frame type affected audience engagement. Trump relied on conflict and negative emotional frames, while Clinton used morality and positive emotional frames.
Spread & networksDetection methods
Fake News: Fundamental Theories, Detection Strategies and ChallengesA comprehensive tutorial framework addressing fake news research across three dimensions: (1) fundamental theories from psychology, social science, economics, and forensics explaining human vulnerability to misinformation and why individuals participate in fake news activities; (2) detection strategies unified across four perspectives…
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformationThis large-scale empirical study demonstrates that a free ~15-minute online browser game teaching six common misinformation production techniques (polarisation, emotional manipulation, conspiracy theories, trolling, discrediting opponents, impersonation) significantly reduces perceived reliability of misinformation across N=15,000…
Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification
Why People Believe Fake News, Myths & Conspiracy TheoriesBrendan Nyhan surveys research on why people hold false beliefs about politics, health, and conspiracy theories despite exposure to corrective information. He identifies two core mechanisms: selective exposure (people seek out information matching their worldview) and selective acceptance (people dismiss contradictory information through…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
How technology can fight extremism and online harassmentYasmin Green, head of Jigsaw, presents two technological interventions addressing online harms rooted in human psychology. For radicalization: the "Redirect Method" (piloted 2016) uses online advertising to intercept users searching for extremist content (e.g., "How do I join ISIS?") and show them counter-propaganda videos from credible…
Detection methodsLLMs & generative AI
Automated identification of media bias in news articles: an interdisciplinary literature reviewThis paper surveys automated and manual methods for identifying media bias in news articles, bridging social science and computer science approaches. It defines nine distinct forms of media bias and maps social science research onto computational techniques, finding that NLP-based methods are promising for automated detection but remain…
Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation
Predicting Factuality of Reporting and Bias of News Media SourcesThis paper frames predicting news media factuality and bias as classification tasks at the news outlet level rather than at the claim or article level. The authors extract 141 features from multiple sources (articles, Wikipedia, Twitter, URL structure, web traffic) and train SVM classifiers, creating a dataset of 1,066 websites manually…
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Hate Lingo: A Target-based Linguistic Analysis of Hate Speech in Social MediaThis paper presents the first large-scale linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of hate speech categorized by its target: directed (personal attacks) versus generalized (targeting groups). The authors analyze 28,318 directed and ~2,500 generalized hate tweets, revealing that directed hate is more informal, angry, and explicitly…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web CommunitiesLarge-scale empirical study of how image memes originate and propagate across fringe and mainstream Web communities. Analyzes 160M images posted to Twitter, Reddit, /pol/, and Gab (2016–2017) using perceptual hashing, clustering, and custom distance metrics.
Platforms, policy & societyFact-checking & verification
The Science of Fake NewsThis multidisciplinary review establishes a scientific framework for studying fake news, defining it as fabricated information that mimics news media form but lacks editorial norms. The paper identifies two mitigation strategies—empowering individuals through fact-checking and education, and structural platform interventions—while…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarizationThis field experiment tested whether exposure to opposing political views on social media reduces polarization. Twitter users (Republicans and Democrats) were randomly offered money to follow bots retweeting messages from opposing politicians and opinion leaders for one month.
Spread & networksPsychology & interventions
The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumptionContrary to claims that fake news has reached a broad audience, this empirical analysis of comScore data shows the fake news audience is small and comprises heavy internet users. Applying the Law of Double Jeopardy from media theory, the authors show that fake news attracts disloyal audiences disproportionately from social platforms.
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domainThis special issue introduction proposes four foundational principles for the emerging scientific study of conspiracy belief: conspiracy beliefs are consequential (with real impacts on health and relationships), universal (across cultures and historical periods), emotional (driven by sense-making rather than logic), and social (rooted in…
Spread & networksDetection methods
This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real NewsFake news differs systematically from real news in stylistic features, especially titles. Contrary to the assumption that fake news mimics real news, it is actually more similar to satire: packed titles with fewer stop words and more proper nouns, combined with shorter, repetitive body text with simpler language.
Detection methodsLLMs & generative AI
Separating Facts from Fiction: Linguistic Models to Classify Suspicious and Trusted News Posts on TwitterThis paper presents neural network models combining tweet content, social network interactions, and linguistic features (bias markers, subjectivity cues, moral foundations) to classify Twitter news posts as suspicious (propaganda, hoaxes, clickbait, satire) or verified. The models achieve 95% accuracy on binary classification and 0.7…
Fact-checking & verificationPsychology & interventions
Claim Ranking in Political DebatesEarly work framing check-worthiness as claim ranking; introduces the notion of "importance weighting" for prioritizing claims for fact-checking in political debates. Foundational for understanding which claims warrant verification effort.