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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…
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 & 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…
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 & 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.
Spread & networksDetection methods
Studying Fake News via Network Analysis: Detection and MitigationThis chapter surveys network-based approaches to fake news detection and mitigation on social media, organizing fake news dissemination along three dimensions (content, social, temporal) and introduces methods exploiting network structure: homogeneous networks (friendship, diffusion, credibility) and heterogeneous networks (knowledge,…
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 & networksDetection methods
Rumor Detection on Twitter with Tree-structured Recursive Neural NetworksProposes two variants of recursive neural networks (RvNN)—bottom-up and top-down—that operate on propagation tree structures of tweets to detect rumors. Rather than treating tweets sequentially, the model learns representations that respect how tweets actually propagate in response threads.
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systemsSocial bots during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum strategically targeted influential humans to amplify negative and inflammatory content. Operating from network peripheries, bots coordinated sentiment-driven amplification that exacerbated polarization, with approximately one in three referendum-related tweets generated by bots.
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
Influencers in Polarized Political Networks on TwitterThis paper identifies three types of influencers in polarized political Twitter conversations during Brazil's 2016 Dilma Rousseff impeachment: "opinion leaders" who shape discourse within ideological groups, "informational influencers" (media/institutions) drawn into one camp, and "activists" who amplify like-minded messages. The…
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.
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.
Detection methodsSpread & networks
"News you don't believe": Audience perspectives on fake newsUsing focus groups and surveys across the US, UK, Spain, and Finland, Nielsen and Graves find that ordinary people see fake news as a spectrum rather than a binary distinction—encompassing poor journalism, political propaganda, misleading advertising, and fabricated content. Audiences experience the "fake news" problem as one of degree,…
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.
Spread & networksDetection methods
Topological Recurrent Neural Network for Diffusion PredictionWang et al. propose Topo-LSTM, a novel LSTM architecture for modeling dynamic directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to predict which node will be activated next in information cascades. The key insight is that information diffusion on networks should be modeled explicitly as diffusion topologies—graphs showing how information spreads from…
Detection methodsSpread & networks
Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social NetworksHoaxes on Facebook can be detected with 99% accuracy using user interaction patterns (who "liked" posts) rather than content analysis. Two algorithms—logistic regression and harmonic boolean crowdsourcing—achieve high accuracy even with minimal labeled training data, and knowledge transfers across different Facebook communities.
Spread & networksDetection methods
Turing at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Sequential Approach to Rumour Stance Classification with Branch-LSTMThis paper proposes Branch-LSTM, a sequential neural model for rumour stance classification in Twitter conversations. By decomposing conversation threads into linear branches and modeling them with LSTM layers, the approach captures conversational context while assigning stance labels (Support/Deny/Query/Comment) to each tweet.
Detection methodsSpread & networks
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts Using Propagation Structure via Kernel LearningThis paper addresses rumor detection in microblog posts by modeling information diffusion as propagation trees and proposing a kernel-based method (PTK) that captures high-order structural patterns differentiating rumors from non-rumors. The approach extends to context-sensitive variants (cPTK) and achieves superior early detection…
Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation
Quantifying Controversy on Social MediaThis work presents a graph-based pipeline to measure controversy in social media discussions. The authors build conversation graphs from Twitter interactions (retweets, follows, mentions), partition them to identify opposing sides, and apply multiple controversy measures—with a random-walk-based metric (RWC) emerging as the most reliable…
Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation
SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumoursRumourEval is a shared task benchmark for detecting and verifying rumours in social media. It introduces two subtasks: (a) stance classification (SDQC: Support/Deny/Query/Comment) of replies to rumourous claims, and (b) veracity prediction (true/false) of source tweets.
Spread & networksPsychology & interventions
Spreadable Spectacle in Digital Culture: Civic Expression, Fake News, and the Role of Media Literacies in "Post-Fact" SocietyThis paper explores how spectacle—media constructs outside ordinary routine that capitalize on polarization—spreads through digital culture during the 2016 U.S. election. Using the Pizzagate conspiracy theory as a case study, the authors argue that citizen-driven spectacle leverages homophilous networks, memes, and appropriated cultural…
Spread & networksPsychology & interventions
Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networksMoral-emotional language (words combining moral and emotional content) increases message diffusion in social networks by ~20% per word. This effect is stronger within political in-groups than out-groups, explaining how moral and political ideas spread within polarized "echo chambers" on platforms like Twitter.
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy MakingThis Council of Europe report introduces a comprehensive framework for understanding "information disorder" via three types (mis-, dis-, mal-information) defined by falseness and intent-to-harm. It examines the agents, messages, and interpreters involved, the creation-production-distribution lifecycle, and proposes 34 recommendations…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
The Spread of True and False News OnlineAnalyzes 126,000 verified true and false news cascades from Twitter (2006–2017) covering 3 million users and 4.5 million shares. False news diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth across all categories, with false political news spreading fastest.