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Detection methodsDeepfakes & multimodal Embracing Domain Differences in Fake News: Cross-domain Fake News Detection using Multimodal DataMost fake news detection models are trained on a single domain (e.g., politics) and fail when tested on others (e.g., entertainment, COVID-19). This paper proposes a multimodal framework that leverages both domain-specific and cross-domain knowledge to detect fake news across different domains. Silva et al. · AAAI 2021 · 2021

Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks News literacy, social media behaviors, and skepticism toward information on social mediaA national survey of 788 Americans examines how news literacy relates to what people see and share on social media, and whether it predicts skepticism toward information shared in these spaces. The key finding: people with higher news literacy see and post less political content on social media, but when they do engage, they're… Vraga & Tully · Information, Communication & Society · 2021

Spread & networksPsychology & interventions Shared partisanship dramatically increases social tie formation in a Twitter field experimentA Twitter field experiment with bot accounts reveals that shared partisanship causally drives social tie formation: users were nearly three times more likely to reciprocally follow accounts matching their political party, regardless of the account's partisan intensity. Critically, this preference was symmetric—Democrats and Republicans… Mosleh et al. · National Academy of Sciences · 2021

Psychology & interventionsSpread & networks Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on TwitterHigh scorers on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT)—a measure of analytical thinking—are more discerning social media users: they follow fewer accounts, share news from more reliable sources, and engage more with substantive topics like politics. The study identifies "cognitive echo chambers" where low-CRT users preferentially follow… Mosleh et al. · Nature Communications · 2021

Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don'tA survey of 1,299 U.S. citizens tests whether four types of media literacy—media, information, news, and digital—predict ability to identify fake news. Only information literacy (the ability to search and evaluate verified sources) significantly improves fake news identification; media, news, and digital literacies showed no significant… Jones-Jang et al. · American Behavioral Scientist · 2021

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTubeLarge-scale study of 309,813 U.S. users' YouTube and web browsing from 2016–2019 finds that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream, centrist sources. While far-right content exists and engages users intensely, it remains a small and stable share. Hosseinmardi et al. · PNAS · 2021

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society The echo chamber effect on social mediaComparative analysis of 100+ million posts across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Gab on controversial topics shows echo chambers operate differently by platform: Facebook and Twitter exhibit strong homophilic clustering and polarized information diffusion, while Reddit and Gab show single-sided communities without the biased diffusion… Cinelli et al. · National Academy of Sciences · 2021

Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns On the Detection of Disinformation Campaign Activity with Network AnalysisState-sponsored disinformation campaigns on Twitter exhibit distinct coordination patterns (shared messages, hashtags, URLs, retweet cascades) that differ from legitimate coordinated activity. The paper proposes using coordination network features—extracted from daily account interactions—to train a binary classifier that detects… Vargas et al. · Cloud Computing Security Workshop · 2020 Detection methodsLLMs & generative AI The Limitations of Stylometry for Detecting Machine-Generated Fake NewsWhile stylometry effectively detects impersonation and provenance, it fails to distinguish between legitimate and malicious uses of language models for generating false content. LMs produce stylistically consistent text regardless of veracity, and adding even a single auto-generated sentence within human-written text evades stylometric… Schuster et al. · Computational Linguistics · 2020

Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case StudiesThis paper proposes a general, unsupervised, network-based methodology to detect coordinated inauthentic behavior on social media. The approach identifies behavioral traces (handle changes, image sharing, hashtag sequences, co-retweets, synchronized actions) and constructs bipartite networks to discover clusters of accounts likely… Pacheco et al. · ICWSM · 2020

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US electionUsing combined survey and web-traffic data from the 2016 US presidential election, Guess et al. found that while 44.3% of Americans aged 18+ visited an untrustworthy website during the campaign, actual exposure was highly concentrated among Trump supporters (56.7% of Trump supporters vs. 27.7% of Clinton supporters). Facebook played a… Guess et al. · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020

Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society Assessing the risks of 'infodemics' in response to COVID-19 epidemicsAnalysis of 112+ million geolocated Twitter messages about COVID-19 (January–March 2020) across 64 languages and countries. Develops an infodemic risk index (IRI) measuring exposure to unreliable news; demonstrates that waves of unreliable information precede pandemic waves, providing early-warning signals for policy intervention. Gallotti et al. · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020

Fact-checking & verificationPlatforms, policy & society Types, Sources, and Claims of COVID-19 MisinformationSystematic analysis of 225 fact-checked COVID-19 misinformation pieces reveals that most false content reconfigures existing information (59%) rather than fabricating entirely new claims. Public authorities are cited in 39% of misinformation, yet top-down claims from politicians and celebrities account for only 20% of volume but drive… Brennen et al. · Reuters Institute for the Study of… · 2020

LLMs & generative AIPlatforms, policy & society Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersThis landmark paper introduces GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter autoregressive language model, and demonstrates that it achieves strong performance on diverse NLP tasks through in-context few-shot learning without any task-specific fine-tuning. The model exhibits remarkable scaling properties where larger models dramatically improve… Brown et al. · NeurIPS 2020 · 2020

Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19COVID-19 misinformation has proliferated rapidly on social media, undermining public health responses and vaccination uptake. Rather than relying on post-hoc fact-checking (which spreads slower than misinformation), the authors propose psychological inoculation—exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation techniques beforehand to… van der Linden et al. · Frontiers in Psychology · 2020

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… Shu et al. · Book chapter · 2020

Datasets & evaluationDetection methods Fighting an Infodemic: COVID-19 Fake News DatasetThe authors present a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 COVID-19 related posts and articles (52% real, 48% fake) collected from social media and fact-checking websites. They benchmark four machine learning baselines (Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, SVM, Gradient Boost), achieving 93.32% F1-score with SVM, and release both the… Patwa et al. · Springer · 2020

Deepfakes & multimodalDetection methods The Creation and Detection of Deepfakes: A SurveyComprehensive 38-page survey covering both creation and detection of deepfakes. Systematically reviews generative neural network architectures (GANs, autoencoders, CNNs, RNNs), technical approaches to reenactment, replacement, editing, and synthesis. Mirsky & Lee · ACM Computing Surveys · 2020

Bots & coordinated campaignsDatasets & evaluation A Decade of Social Bot DetectionA comprehensive review of social bot detection research from 2010 to 2020, documenting the evolution from supervised individual-account detection to group-level approaches targeting coordinated inauthentic behavior. The paper traces the escalating "arms race" between bot developers and detection researchers, illustrates bots' documented… Cresci · Communications of the ACM · 2020

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,… Bian et al. · AAAI 2020 · 2020

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… Baly et al. · 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for… · 2020

Deepfakes & multimodalFact-checking & verification A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies? The Effects and Mechanisms of Multimodal Disinformation and Rebuttals Disseminated via Social MediaMultimodal disinformation (paired text and images) is perceived as more credible than text-only misinformation, but fact-checkers can overcome this effect. Importantly, the modality of fact-checks (visual or textual) matters less than their presence; fact-checks are more persuasive for people whose prior attitudes already oppose the… Hameleers et al. · Political Communication · 2020

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… Wilson & Wiysonge · BMJ Global Health · 2020

Fact-checking & verificationPsychology & interventions Fact-Checking: A Meta-Analysis of What Works and for WhomMeta-analysis of 30 studies on fact-checking effectiveness finds modest but significant positive effects (d = 0.29) on belief correction. However, effects are substantially moderated by motivated reasoning, political ideology, message design, and context: pro-attitudinal fact-checking works better than counter-attitudinal corrections,… Walter et al. · Political Communication · 2020