User Susceptibility to Fake News¶
User susceptibility quantifies an individual's propensity to share, believe, or engage with fake news. Susceptibility is not uniform—some users are inherently more vulnerable to misinformation due to cognitive biases, personality traits, or social context.
In profile-based approaches, susceptibility may be operationalized as the fraction of a user's shared news that is false, or as their agreement with statements they later learn are false. In causal approaches, susceptibility becomes the outcome variable whose causes (user attributes, behavioral patterns) are investigated.
Key papers¶
- Causal Understanding of Fake News Dissemination on Social Media — identifies user attributes causally linked to sharing susceptibility via propensity-weighted embeddings
Related topics¶
- User Attributes (demographic and behavioral factors)
- Fake news audience and consumption (who engages with misinformation)
- Psychological Drivers Misinformation (cognitive and emotional mechanisms)