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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. Brady et al. · National Academy of Sciences · 2017

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… Mihailidis & Viotty · American Behavioral Scientist · 2017

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 ElectionAllcott and Gentzkov provide the first comprehensive empirical evidence on fake news exposure during the 2016 US election. Drawing on a curated database of 156 fake news articles, web traffic data, and a post-election survey of 1,200 adults, they estimate the average American saw and remembered 1.14 fake news articles during the election… Allcott & Gentzkov · Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2017

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. Vosoughi et al. · MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy… · 2017

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… Wardle & Derakhshan · Council of Europe report · 2017

Spread & networksPsychology & interventions Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News ConsumptionThis paper examines whether technological changes (social media, search engines) increase ideological segregation in online news consumption by analyzing web-browsing data from 50,000 active news readers. They find that while social media and search are associated with higher segregation than direct browsing, the overall effects are… Flaxman et al. · Public Opinion Quarterly · 2016

Spread & networksDetection methods DeepCas: an End-to-end Predictor of Information CascadesDeepCas predicts the future size of information cascades (e.g., how many people will eventually retweet a post or cite a paper) using an end-to-end deep learning model that represents cascade graphs as sets of random walk paths. Instead of relying on hand-crafted network features, the model learns cascade representations automatically… Li et al. · arXiv · 2016

Spread & networksDetection methods Stance Classification in Rumours as a Sequential Task Exploiting the Tree Structure of Social Media ConversationsProposes that modelling Twitter conversations as tree-structured sequences improves rumour stance classification. Introduces Linear and Tree Conditional Random Fields (CRF) to exploit the sequential structure of replies within rumour threads, showing that Tree CRF significantly outperforms non-sequential baselines on 4,519 annotated… Zubiaga et al. · arXiv · 2016

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing ViewsThis paper proposes an algorithmic approach to reduce polarization on social media by recommending social connections (edges) between opposing sides. Using an endorsement graph representation and the random-walk-based controversy metric, the authors formulate the problem as k-edge-addition and develop an efficient algorithm (ROV) that… Garimella et al. · WSDM 2017 · 2016

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate changeFarrell analyzes 40,785 texts (39+ million words) from 164 climate contrarian organizations between 1993–2013, employing Structural Topic Modeling and social network analysis to demonstrate that corporate funding from entities like ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations directly influences which polarization themes are created and… Farrell · National Academy of Sciences · 2016

Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation Rumor CascadesFriggeri et al. tracked thousands of rumors on Facebook using Snopes.com as ground truth, finding that rumor cascades run deeper in the social network than typical content. True rumors spread more virally than false ones despite false rumors being more frequently uploaded; Snopes fact-checks increase deletion likelihood for false rumors… Friggeri et al. · Eighth International AAAI Conference on… · 2014

Spread & networksDetection methods Can Cascades be Predicted?Information cascades on social networks can be predicted with reasonable accuracy (~80%) using temporal and structural features extracted from early observations. Performance improves substantially as more cascade stages are observed. Cheng et al. · International Conference on Web and Social Media · 2014

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Beware online filter bubblesAlgorithmic personalization on major platforms like Facebook and Google has created "filter bubbles" — personalized information universes that show us what we're predicted to like rather than what we need to see. This invisible algorithmic gatekeeping threatens democracy and information diversity by isolating us in narrow perspectives,… Pariser · 2011

Detection methodsSpread & networks Information Credibility on TwitterThis paper proposes supervised learning classifiers to automatically assess the credibility of news discussed on Twitter. Using human-labeled topics from trending discussions, the authors extract message-level, user-level, topic-level, and propagation-level features to build classifiers that distinguish newsworthy from conversational… Castillo et al. · World Wide Web Conference · 2011

Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog StreamsPolitical campaigns increasingly use social media to amplify deceptive memes that mimic organic grassroots behavior—termed "astroturfing." This paper introduces the Truthy system, which analyzes meme diffusion networks on Twitter to detect orchestrated campaigns through network topology and sentiment analysis, achieving ~90%… Ratkiewicz et al. · arXiv · 2010

Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation The structure and function of complex networksThis comprehensive review surveys the properties and mathematical models of complex networks across diverse domains: social networks, the Internet, biological networks, and collaboration networks. Newman covers observed structural properties (degree distributions, clustering, small-world effects), foundational models (random graphs,… Newman · Reviews of Modern Physics · 2003 Spread & networksPsychology & interventions A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational CascadesFoundational theoretical framework explaining how fads, fashions, and beliefs spread through sequential information cascades: when individuals use others' actions to infer information while ignoring their own private signals, widespread adoption of incorrect beliefs and practices can occur. Bikhchandani et al. · Journal of Political Economy · 1992 Platforms, policy & societyBots & coordinated campaigns Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential ElectionThis large-scale analysis of mainstream and social media coverage during the 2016 U.S. presidential election documents asymmetric partisan structures: conservative media formed an insulated, hyperpartisan ecosystem centered on far-right outlets like Breitbart, while liberal media remained anchored in traditional journalistic practices.… Faris et al. Spread & networksPsychology & interventions Avoiding the Echo Chamber About Echo Chambers: Why selective exposure to like-minded political news is less prevalent than you thinkThis Knight Foundation white paper reviews the academic literature on echo chambers and filter bubbles and argues that the narrative of pervasive ideological self-segregation in media consumption is significantly overstated. While people do prefer congenial political information, most Americans consume diverse media diets; most partisan… Guess et al. Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific LiteratureThis comprehensive literature review examines the relationships among social media usage, political polarization, and political disinformation, synthesizing research across six topic areas: online political conversations, consequences of disinformation exposure, producers of disinformation, spreading strategies, content and polarization… Tucker et al. Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media ManipulationA comprehensive inventory of government and political-party organized social media manipulation campaigns (cyber troops) across 70 countries. The report catalogs organizational structures, strategies, platforms, and resources deployed for computational propaganda; finds organized manipulation in 70 countries (up from 28 in 2017), with… Bradshaw & Howard Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society WhatsApp vigilantes: an exploration of citizen reception and circulation of WhatsApp misinformation linked to mob violence in IndiaThis LSE report examines how WhatsApp misinformation circulation in India relates to lynchings and mob violence since 2015. The study investigates citizen reception, technological affordances, motivations for sharing, and the broader socio-political context shaping how false information spreads through messaging platforms and triggers… Banaji et al.

Spread & networksDetection methods Climate Change Misinformation: Supply, Demand, and the Challenges to ScienceLewandowsky examines climate denial through supply and demand lenses: well-funded disinformation campaigns (billions annually from fossil fuel interests and conservative think tanks) deploy cherry-picked data to infiltrate mainstream media and political rhetoric, while political ideology (conservatism, libertarianism) predisposes people… Lewandowsky · Swiss Global Change Day Keynote

Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns The Spread of Misinformation in Social MediaMenczer presents a framework for understanding misinformation spread through social networks as an inevitable consequence of network structure and human cognitive limitations rather than platform design failures. He discusses how structural properties—scale-free topology, finite attention, information overload—create vulnerabilities… Menczer · OSoMe, Indiana University