Tag: Misinformation

Countering AI-generated misinformation with pre-emptive source discreditation and debunking

Featured Database

Author: Spearing, Emily R.; Gile, Constantina I.; Fogwill, Amy L.; Prike, Toby; Swire-Thompson, Briony; Lewandowsky, Stephan; Ecker, Ullrich K. H. Description: Despite widespread concerns over AI-generated misinformation, its impact on people’s reasoning and the effectiveness of countermeasures remain unclear. This study examined whether a pre-emptive, source-focused inoculation–designed to lower trust in AI-generated information–could reduce its influence on reasoning. This approach was compared with a retroactive, content-focused debunking, as well as a simple disclaimer that AI-generated information may be misleading, as often seen on real-world platforms. Additionally, the extent to which…

See more and a link to full text

Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality

Featured Database

Author: Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G. Description: Reducing the spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is a major challenge. We investigate one potential approach: having social media platform algorithms preferentially display content from news sources that users rate as trustworthy. To do so, we ask whether crowdsourced trust ratings can effectively differentiate more versus less reliable sources. We ran two preregistered experiments ( = 1,010 from Mechanical Turk and = 970 from Lucid) where individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: (…

See more and a link to full text

The spread of low-credibility content by social bots

Featured Database

Author: Shao, C.; Ciampaglia, G. L.; Varol, O.; Yang, K.-C.; Flammini, A. & Menczer, F. Description: The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major threat to democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are studying the complex causes for the viral diffusion of misinformation, while online platforms are beginning to deploy countermeasures. Little systematic, data-based evidence has been published to guide these efforts. Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017. We find evidence that…

See more and a link to full text
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.