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GUIDEUnderstanding fake news, misinformation & disinformation

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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. Bovet & Makse · Nature Communications · 2019 Deepfakes & multimodalDetection methods Deep Learning for Deepfakes Creation and Detection: A SurveyComprehensive survey of deep learning methods for creating and detecting deepfakes, covering face-swapping and lip-syncing generation techniques (GANs, autoencoders, encoder-decoder pairs), detection approaches (visual artifacts, temporal features, forensics), and challenges in cross-dataset generalization. The paper discusses… Nguyen et al. · arXiv · 2019 Deepfakes & multimodalDetection methods The Emergence of Deepfake Technology: A ReviewThis review analyzes 84 news articles about deepfakes to synthesize understanding of synthetic video technology, its applications, threats, and countermeasures. Deepfakes—hyper-realistic videos created using AI (primarily GANs)—lower the barrier to video forgery and represent a significant threat to trust, elections, and security. Westerlund · Technology Innovation Management Review · 2019 Platforms, policy & societyBots & coordinated campaigns Facebook's role in Brexit — and the threat to democracyInvestigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr exposes the systematic abuse of Facebook as an instrument for election interference during the 2016 Brexit referendum. She documents illegal campaign spending, microtargeted disinformation, Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of 87 million user profiles, and traces connections between Brexit and… Cadwalladr · 2019 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… Citron · 2019 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… Marantz · 2019 Detection methodsSpread & networks Fake News in the 2016 and 2018 Campaigns: Prevalence, Detection, and EffectsNyhan presents empirical findings on fake news consumption in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. campaigns, drawing from survey data with browser tracking to measure actual article visits. While mainstream media reported on fake news as a widespread crisis, his research shows that only ~25% of Americans visited fake news websites, and consumption… Nyhan · Ohio State Center for Ethics and Human Values · 2019 Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns 5 Reasons Why Social Networks Make Us Vulnerable to MisinformationMenczer presents five fundamental factors that make social networks inherently vulnerable to misinformation spread. Information and misinformation propagate through networks at equivalent rates due to structural properties of scale-free networks combined with human cognitive limitations. Menczer · Aula Rostagni, University of Padova · 2019 Platforms, policy & societySpread & networks How You Can Help Transform the Internet into a Place of TrustWardle examines the systemic challenges of moderating harmful content at internet scale while preserving freedom of expression. She argues that the core problem is not technical (AI could theoretically detect violations) but structural: platforms and governments lack clear authority to decide what constitutes harmful speech, face… Wardle · 2019 Platforms, policy & society The platform governance triangle: conceptualising the informal regulation of online contentThis paper applies Abbott and Snidal's "governance triangle" framework to analyze how state actors, technology firms, and civil society organizations informally regulate online content through voluntary standards, codes of conduct, and multistakeholder initiatives. The analysis maps the European platform governance landscape, showing how… Gorwa · Internet Policy Review · 2019 LLMs & generative AIDetection methods RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining ApproachA replication and improvement study of BERT pretraining showing that BERT was significantly undertrained. RoBERTa introduces four key improvements—training longer with larger batches and more data, removing the next-sentence-prediction objective, training on longer sequences, and dynamically masking tokens—to achieve state-of-the-art… Liu et al. · arXiv · 2019 Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of ClaimsMultiFC is the largest publicly available real-world dataset of naturally occurring factual claims (34,918 claims) collected from 26 fact-checking websites, with rich metadata, evidence pages retrieved via Google Search, and entity linking to Wikipedia. The paper demonstrates that evidence ranking combined with veracity prediction… Augenstein et al. · arXiv · 2019 Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation A Richly Annotated Corpus for Different Tasks in Automated Fact-CheckingThe paper introduces SNOPES, a large-scale fact-checking corpus with 6,422 validated claims and 14,296 documents covering multiple domains (news, social media, blogs). Each claim is annotated with evidence text snippets, evidence stance (support/refute/no stance), and verdicts, enabling training of models for four core fact-checking… Hanselowski et al. · arXiv · 2019 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. Horta Ribeiro et al. · ACM 2020 Conference on Fairness,… · 2019 Detection methodsLLMs & generative AI Learning Hierarchical Discourse-level Structure for Fake News DetectionProposes HDSF, a framework that learns hierarchical discourse-level structure (dependency trees of sentences) for fake news detection without annotated corpora. Identifies three structure-related properties that distinguish fake from real news and shows HDSF achieves 82.19% accuracy, outperforming linguistic baselines. Karimi & Tang · arXiv · 2019 Datasets & evaluationDetection methods Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social MediaThis paper introduces OLID (Offensive Language Identification Dataset), a large-scale dataset of 14,100 English tweets annotated with a three-level hierarchical schema for detecting offensive content. The hierarchy distinguishes offensive from non-offensive posts (Level A), categorizes offense type as targeted insults or untargeted… Zampieri et al. · NAACL · 2019 Detection methodsDatasets & evaluation SemEval-2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social MediaSemEval-2019 Task 6 reports on a shared task competition for identifying and categorizing offensive language in social media using the OLID dataset. Approximately 800 teams registered and 115 submitted results across three sub-tasks: offensive language detection (104 teams), offense type categorization (71 teams), and offense target… Zampieri et al. · 13th International Workshop on Semantic… · 2019 LLMs & generative AIDetection methods Generating Sentiment-Preserving Fake Online Reviews Using Neural Language Models and Their Human- and Machine-based DetectionThe paper demonstrates a practical attack where low-skilled adversaries can generate high-quality fake product reviews at scale by fine-tuning publicly available GPT-2 models on real review datasets. A two-step approach—generation plus BERT-based validation to preserve sentiment—produces reviews indistinguishable from genuine ones. Adelani et al. · arXiv · 2019 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. Baly et al. · arXiv · 2019 Deepfakes & multimodalDetection methods FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological SignalsFakeCatcher detects deepfakes by analyzing biological signals (photoplethysmography—blood flow patterns) extracted from facial regions. The key insight is that generative models fail to preserve spatial coherence and temporal consistency of these signals in authentic videos, making biological signal analysis a powerful forensic tool… Cifci et al. · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and… · 2019 Bots & coordinated campaignsDetection methods Better Safe Than Sorry: an Adversarial Approach to improve Social Bot DetectionProposes GenBot, a novel genetic algorithm that synthesizes evolved versions of existing spambots by encoding behavioral timelines as "digital DNA" sequences and iteratively evolving them to resemble legitimate user behavior. Tests the evolved bots against three state-of-the-art detection systems and finds they largely evade detection… Cresci et al. · ACM Web Science Conference · 2019 LLMs & generative AIDetection methods GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated TextGehrmann et al. present GLTR, a visual tool for detecting AI-generated text by analyzing statistical anomalies in language model output. The key insight is that language models sample from the head of the distribution (high-probability words), whereas humans use a wider vocabulary including low-probability choices. Gehrmann et al. · arXiv · 2019 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… Gorrell et al. · 13th International Workshop on Semantic… · 2019 LLMs & generative AIDetection methods Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are FooledIppolito et al. investigate the complementary abilities of humans and machines to detect machine-generated text from GPT-2 under various decoding strategies. They find that fine-tuned BERT detectors outperform humans (achieving 80%+ accuracy on long excerpts versus 71% for expert human raters), but detector performance is highly… Ippolito et al. · arXiv · 2019