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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.
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…
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.
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…
Deepfakes & multimodalDetection methods
EANN: Event Adversarial Neural Networks for Multi-Modal Fake News DetectionThe paper proposes EANN, an adversarial neural network that detects fake news on newly emerged events by learning event-invariant features. An event discriminator forces the multi-modal feature extractor to remove event-specific features while preserving shared patterns across events.
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 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,…
Detection methodsDatasets & evaluation
Automatic Detection of Fake NewsThis paper introduces two novel fake news detection datasets covering seven news domains and analyzes linguistic properties that distinguish fake from legitimate content. Using linguistic features including readability metrics, word categories, and punctuation patterns, the authors build classifiers achieving up to 78% accuracy and…
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.
Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation
ClaimBuster: The first end-to-end fact-checking systemFoundational work introducing ClaimBuster, an end-to-end automated fact-checking system. Introduces a dataset of 23,533 human-annotated U.S. debate statements with check-worthiness labels, establishing baselines for automated claim check-worthiness detection and ranking.
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
The Truth About False NewsA presentation discussing findings from a large-scale longitudinal study of false and true news spread on Twitter (2006–2017). The research found that false news spreads further, faster, and more broadly than truth by orders of magnitude—not primarily due to bots, but because humans are more susceptible to sharing novel information, and…
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
Social Bots and the Spread of Fake NewsA presentation on how social bots amplify misinformation spread on Twitter and other social platforms. The speaker discusses bot detection techniques (network structure, user behavior, temporal patterns), case studies of coordinated bot campaigns (2010–2016 elections, vaccine debates, Brexit), findings showing bots act as "igniters" in…
Detection methodsDatasets & evaluation
A Survey on Hate Speech Detection using Natural Language ProcessingThis survey systematically reviews automatic hate speech detection methods, covering feature extraction techniques (surface features, embeddings, sentiment analysis, lexical resources, linguistic features, knowledge bases), classification approaches (mostly supervised learning with SVMs and neural networks), annotation practices, and key…
LLMs & generative AI
Attention Is All You NeedThe authors introduce the Transformer, a sequence transduction model based entirely on self-attention mechanisms that dispenses with recurrence and convolution. The model achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores on machine translation tasks while being significantly more parallelizable and requiring less training time.
Spread & networksFact-checking & verification
Leveraging the Crowd to Detect and Reduce the Spread of Fake News and MisinformationOnline social networks use crowd-powered flagging to identify misinformation: when users flag a story, enough flags trigger fact-checking, which disputes false claims. This paper formulates the problem of deciding which stories to fact-check and when, subject to limited fact-checking resources, as a stochastic optimal control problem.
Bots & coordinated campaignsDetection methods
The Paradigm-Shift of Social Spambots: Evidence, Theories, and Tools for the Arms RaceThis paper provides empirical evidence of a paradigm shift in spambot design on Twitter, where new "social spambots" closely mimic genuine user behavior and successfully evade detection. Neither Twitter's automated systems, human annotators, nor established academic detection tools can effectively identify these accounts; however,…
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.
Fact-checking & verificationDatasets & evaluation
Finding Streams in Knowledge Graphs to Support Fact CheckingKnowledge Stream (KS) is an unsupervised network-flow approach for computational fact-checking that treats a knowledge graph as a flow network. For a triple (subject, predicate, object), KS finds multiple paths connecting subject to object and uses edge capacities (based on relational similarity and node specificity) to compute a truth…
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.
Datasets & evaluationFact-checking & verification
Liar, Liar Pants on Fire: A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News DetectionThis paper introduces LIAR, a benchmark dataset of 12,836 manually labeled short statements from POLITIFACT.COM spanning 2007–2016, addressing the critical lack of labeled data for fake news detection. Each statement is annotated with fine-grained veracity labels (pants-fire, false, barely-true, half-true, mostly-true, true) and rich…
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…
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.