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Detection methodsSpread & networks
Mining Disinformation and Fake News: Concepts, Methods, and Recent AdvancementsThis comprehensive tutorial surveys the landscape of fake news and disinformation research across three dimensions: understanding user engagement in information disorder, techniques for detecting and mitigating false content, and emerging challenges like fake news literacy and neural generation. The authors emphasize weak social…
Spread & networksDetection methods
Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional NetworksProposes Bi-GCN, a graph convolutional network approach for rumor detection that models both top-down propagation patterns (how rumors spread from source) and bottom-up dispersion patterns (how rumors diffuse within communities). By capturing both directional characteristics jointly and incorporating source post features at each layer,…
Spread & networksDetection methods
What Was Written vs. Who Read It: News Media Profiling Using Text Analysis and Social Media ContextThis paper predicts the political bias (left/center/right) and factuality (low/mixed/high) of news outlets by analyzing what articles they publish, who follows them on social media, and what Wikipedia says about them. The system achieves 85% accuracy on bias prediction by combining article text, YouTube video features, Twitter audience…
Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks
Social media and vaccine hesitancyLarge-scale cross-national analysis finds that social media use to organize offline action predicts public vaccine safety skepticism, while foreign disinformation campaigns significantly reduce vaccination coverage year-over-year. A one-point increase on the five-point disinformation scale correlates with a two-percentage-point drop in…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Causes and consequences of mainstream media dissemination of fake news: literature review and synthesisWhile fake news websites have limited direct reach, mainstream media coverage is probably how most people encounter fake news stories. This synthesis identifies why mainstream outlets cover falsehoods (journalists' professional duties, news values, peer psychology, technical infrastructure) and explores how mainstream coverage amplifies…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Online misinformation about climate changeComprehensive literature review examining climate change misinformation from multiple disciplinary angles. Defines misinformation vs. disinformation, identifies networks of actors (scientists, governments, industry, media) spreading false claims, examines how social media characteristics (homophily, echo chambers, algorithmic bias)…
Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society
Troll Factories: Manufacturing Specialized Disinformation on TwitterLinvill and Warren analyze 9.04 million tweets from Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) spanning 2009–2018, identifying five specialized account categories—Right Troll, Left Troll, News Feed, Hashtag Gamer, and Fearmonger—each with distinct behavioral patterns, temporal deployment strategies, and communication styles. The authors…
Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society
Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. Presidential ElectionThis paper analyzes 1,052 Russian IRA Twitter accounts to understand their propaganda strategy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. By examining hyperlinks to news stories and YouTube videos, the authors find IRA accounts linked to conservative sources more frequently than liberal ones, consistent with supporting Trump.
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian electionsCoordinated networks of Facebook pages and groups substantially amplified problematic news during Italian elections: coordinated entities shared problematic domains 1.79×–2.22× more frequently than uncoordinated ones. The paper introduces a method to detect "coordinated inauthentic behavior" by identifying entities that…
Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks
Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and ShareFour preregistered experiments (N=2,587) show that repeatedly encountering fake-news headlines reduces moral condemnation of spreading them—regardless of whether people believe them. This "moral repetition effect" operates via fluency: familiar headlines feel less unethical to share, stronger inclinations to promote them online, and…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystemUsing nationally representative data on mobile, desktop, and TV consumption spanning 2016–2018, the authors show that fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet, while TV dominates news consumption by a 5:1 ratio over online. The paper challenges the widespread narrative of fake news as a pervasive crisis and suggests…
Datasets & evaluationDeepfakes & multimodal
ReCOVery: A Multimodal Repository for COVID-19 News Credibility ResearchThe COVID-19 pandemic triggered a parallel "infodemic" of low-credibility news; this paper constructs ReCOVery, a multimodal repository of 2,029 COVID-19 news articles with binary credibility labels inherited from their publisher's NewsGuard/MBFC ratings, paired with 140,820 tweets tracking social spread. The key design trade-off is…
Spread & networksDetection methods
A Survey of Fake News: Fundamental Theories, Detection Methods, and OpportunitiesThis comprehensive survey defines fake news across both broad and narrow framings, systematizes detection methods across four perspectives (knowledge, style, propagation, source), connects detection strategies to interdisciplinary theories from psychology and social sciences, and identifies six open research challenges including early…
Spread & networksDetection methods
Fake news propagation and detection: A sequential modelFoundational sequential social learning model of misinformation spread and fact-checking. Introduces the framework for analyzing how agents' decisions cascade through a network and how fact-checking affects collective outcomes.
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential electionUsing 171 million tweets from the five months preceding the 2016 U.S. election, this study found that 25% of news-sharing tweets contained fake or extremely biased content. Network analysis revealed distinct clusters of fake, biased, and mainstream news spreaders.
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTubeFirst large-scale quantitative audit of user radicalization on YouTube. The authors tracked 349 channels across three ideological communities (Intellectual Dark Web, Alt-lite, Alt-right) and found strong evidence that users systematically migrate toward more extreme content.
Detection methodsSpread & networks
Tree LSTMs with Convolution Units to Predict Stance and Rumor Veracity in Social Media ConversationsProposes Tree LSTM and Binarized Constituency Tree (BCTree) LSTM architectures enhanced with convolution units to classify stance and predict rumor veracity in social media conversation threads. The approach exploits the tree structure inherent in threaded conversations (source post with nested replies) and combines it with convolutional…
Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation
RumourEval 2019: Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for RumoursRumourEval 2019 is a shared task for rumour stance detection and veracity prediction on social media. Extending the 2017 edition, it introduces Reddit data alongside Twitter, provides datasets annotated for SDQC stance (Support/Deny/Query/Comment) and three-way veracity labels, and received 22 system submissions showing that modern…
Spread & networksDetection methods
Hierarchical Propagation Networks for Fake News Detection: Investigation and ExploitationContent-only fake news detection has limited performance because fake news is deliberately crafted to mimic real news. This paper constructs hierarchical propagation networks from both macro-level (tweet/retweet cascade) and micro-level (reply conversation) granularity, extracts structural, temporal, and linguistic features from both…
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…
Detection methodsSpread & networks
dEFEND: Explainable Fake News DetectionFake news detection on social media typically focuses on content alone, but user comments and reactions provide complementary signals. This paper proposes dEFEND, a hierarchical attention neural network that jointly encodes news sentences and user comments to both detect fake news and explain why a piece of news is detected as fake by…
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 & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential ElectionsStudy of 130 public WhatsApp groups during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election found that 13.1% of shared links pointed to junk news sources, with 40% of links directing to YouTube—a platform used strategically to bypass platform moderation. Videos and images dominated message content (33% of all messages) and were heavily…
Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society
Coordinating a Multi-Platform Disinformation Campaign: Internet Research Agency Activity on Three U.S. Social Media Platforms, 2015 to 2017This paper analyzes Russian Internet Research Agency activity across Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit from 2015–2017 using vector autoregression models on 3,126 Facebook ads, 1.9M tweets, and 12,603 Reddit posts. Key finding: Reddit activity influenced subsequent Twitter activity (a "trial balloon" effect), but the IRA's Twitter engagement…