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Research papers on Misinformation on social media

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  1. The science of fake news

    David Lazer, Matthew Baum, Yochai Roberts Benkler, et al. · 2018 · Science · 3,859 citations

    Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort

  2. Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media

    Yuxi Wang, Martin McKee, Aleksandra Torbica, et al. · 2019 · Social Science & Medicine · 1,831 citations

    Contemporary commentators describe the current period as "an era of fake news" in which misinformation, generated intentionally or unintentionally, spreads rapidly. Although affecting all areas of life, it poses particular problems in the health arena, where it can delay or prevent effective care, in some cases threatening the lives of individuals. While examples of the rapid spread of misinformation date back to the earliest days of scientific medicine, the internet, by allowing instantaneous communication and powerful amplification has brought about a quantum change. In democracies where ideas compete in the marketplace for attention, accurate scientific information, which may be difficult

  3. Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review

    Víctor Suárez-Lledó, Javier Álvarez‐Gálvez · 2020 · Journal of Medical Internet Research · 1,481 citations

    BACKGROUND: Although at present there is broad agreement among researchers, health professionals, and policy makers on the need to control and combat health misinformation, the magnitude of this problem is still unknown. Consequently, it is fundamental to discover both the most prevalent health topics and the social media platforms from which these topics are initially framed and subsequently disseminated. OBJECTIVE: This systematic review aimed to identify the main health misinformation topics and their prevalence on different social media platforms, focusing on methodological quality and the diverse solutions that are being implemented to address this public health concern. METHODS: We sea

  5. Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news

    Dietram A. Scheufele, Nicole M. Krause · 2019 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 877 citations

    Concerns about public misinformation in the United States—ranging from politics to science—are growing. Here, we provide an overview of how and why citizens become (and sometimes remain) misinformed about science. Our discussion focuses specifically on misinformation among individual citizens. However, it is impossible to understand individual information processing and acceptance without taking into account social networks, information ecologies, and other macro-level variables that provide important social context. Specifically, we show how being misinformed is a function of a person’s ability and motivation to spot falsehoods, but also of other group-level and societal factors that increa

  6. Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking

    Stephan Lewandowsky, Sander van der Linden · 2021 · European Review of Social Psychology · 749 citations

    There has been increasing concern with the growing infusion of misinformation, or “fake news”, into public discourse and politics in many western democracies. Our article first briefly reviews the current state of the literature on conventional countermeasures to misinformation. We then explore proactive measures to prevent misinformation from finding traction in the first place that is based on the psychological theory of “inoculation”. Inoculation rests on the idea that if people are forewarned that they might be misinformed and are exposed to weakened examples of the ways in which they might be misled, they will become more immune to misinformation. We review a number of techniques that c

  7. Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review

    Esma Aïmeur, Sabrine Amri, Gilles Brassard · 2023 · Social Network Analysis and Mining · 704 citations

    Online social networks (OSNs) are rapidly growing and have become a huge source of all kinds of global and local news for millions of users. However, OSNs are a double-edged sword. Although the great advantages they offer such as unlimited easy communication and instant news and information, they can also have many disadvantages and issues. One of their major challenging issues is the spread of fake news. Fake news identification is still a complex unresolved issue. Furthermore, fake news detection on OSNs presents unique characteristics and challenges that make finding a solution anything but trivial. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are still incapable of overcomi

  8. Trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media

    Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Chuan Yu · 2019 · Research & Politics · 647 citations

    In recent years, there has been widespread concern that misinformation on social media is damaging societies and democratic institutions. In response, social media platforms have announced actions to limit the spread of false content. We measure trends in the diffusion of content from 569 fake news websites and 9540 fake news stories on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. User interactions with false content rose steadily on both Facebook and Twitter through the end of 2016. Since then, however, interactions with false content have fallen sharply on Facebook while continuing to rise on Twitter, with the ratio of Facebook engagements to Twitter shares decreasing by 60%. I

  9. Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19

    Sander van der Linden, Jon Roozenbeek, Josh Compton · 2020 · Frontiers in Psychology · 624 citations

    The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus “infodemic” and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health protective behaviors in the population. In response, we explore how insights from the behavioral sciences can be leveraged to manage an effective societal response to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus. In particular, we discuss the theory

  10. SmoothDectector: A Smoothed Dirichlet Multimodal Approach for Combating Fake News on Social Media

    Akinlolu Oluwabusayo Ojo, Fatma Najar, Nuha Zamzami, et al. · 2025 · IEEE Access · 503 citations

    The rapid dissemination of fake news in the digital era has become a pressing concern. The ease of generating and manipulating fake content, including images, text, audio, and videos, has significantly fueled the spread of misinformation on social media platforms. These platforms often lack rigorous editorial scrutiny, exacerbating this problem. Although recent studies have explored multimodal fake news detection to learn shared representations of textual and visual information, they often learn discrete latent representations, merely concatenations of multimodal features. Simple concatenation or summation operations hinder the dynamic interaction of multimodal features. Furthermore, most mo

  12. Fake News: Spread of Misinformation about Urological Conditions on Social Media.

    S. Loeb, Jacob Taylor, J. Borin, et al. · 2019 · European urology focus · 71 citations

    Although there is a large amount of user-generated content about urological health issues on social media, much of this content has not been vetted for information accuracy. In this article, we review the literature on the quality and balance of information on urological health conditions on social networks. Across a wide range of benign and malignant urological conditions, studies show a substantial amount of commercial, biased and/or inaccurate information present on popular social networking sites. The healthcare community should take proactive steps to improve the quality of medical information on social networks. PATIENT SUMMARY: In this review, we examined the spread of misinformation

  13. SA-Bi-LSTM: Self Attention With Bi-Directional LSTM-Based Intelligent Model for Accurate Fake News Detection to Ensured Information Integrity on Social Media Platforms

    Wang Jian, Jian Ping Li, M. Akbar, et al. · 2024 · IEEE Access · 31 citations

    Detecting fake news is increasingly crucial in the digital age as social platforms and online news outlets amplify the spread of misinformation. This study proposes a novel approach for fake news detection using a Bi-LSTM neural network with an attention mechanism. The Bi-LSTM model’s ability to discern long-range relationships and sequential patterns in text data is augmented by the attention mechanism, focusing on key segments within the text to enhance discriminative power. The dataset for training comprises a diverse collection of news articles, meticulously annotated by human fact-checkers to include both real and fake news samples. Pre-processing steps, including tokenization, are unde

  14. Concerns over the spread of misinformation and fake news on social media – challenges amid the coronavirus pandemic

    J. Leung, M. Schoultz, Vivian Chiu, et al. · 2021 · Proceedings of The 3rd International Electronic Conference on Environmental Research and Public Health —Public Health Issues in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic · 15 citations

    The unfolding pandemic of COVID-19, also known as coronavirus, has caused challenges across the globe. Shelter-in-place, lock-down, and social distancing policies increased the use of social media for societies to stay connected. This study investigated psychological issues societies experienced from using social media among community during this critical period. Cross-sectional online surveys were used to collect qualitative data from 1991 respondents living in the UK, USA and Australia during April-May 2020 when shelter-in-place or stay-at-home policies were in place. The study found that the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories have caused psychosocial challenges and disconnec

  16. Can Correction Messages Reduce the Spread of Fake News on Social Media? The Impact of Information Updates on the Effectiveness of Corrections

    Kelvin K. King, Diego Escobari · 2025 · Journal of Management Information Systems · 6 citations

    ABSTRACT Although government agencies and fact-checking organizations issue correction messages to mitigate misinformation dissemination on social media, their efforts have been largely ineffective. Drawing on Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) and information extracted from over 84 million tweets, we examine the impact of correction messages and explore how different information updates affect their effectiveness. Our empirical approach differentiates between subpopulations of correction messages. The results support the existence of two distinct types: correction messages that significantly mitigate the spread of fake news—a 1 percent increase in “effective” messages decreases the sprea

  17. Social media, misinformation and fake news in the pandemic: the dominant gaps and future research avenues

    Noel Nutsugah, K. Mensah, Raphael Odoom, et al. · 2024 · Online Inf. Rev. · 6 citations

    PurposeSocial networking sites have become breeding grounds for the spread of fake news and misinformation. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the spread of fake news intensified, causing complications for health communicators by drowning authentic information from verifiable official sources. Looking at the impact of this growing phenomenon on people’s attitudes and behaviour during the pandemic, research in the area must be populated to help governments, supranational organisations, non-governmental organisations as well as civil society organisations to formulate policies to curb the menace. This study was therefore undertaken to unravel current gaps and future research avenues to em

  18. Fake News? Quantifying the Prevalence of Misinformation Related to Scoliosis on the TikTok Social Media Platform

    Banahene Glover, Anne-Marie Datcu, Macy Meyer, et al. · 2025 · Journal of the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America · 4 citations

    Background The lack of presence by spine deformity surgeons on TikTok, in addition to the platform’s unregulated nature, raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation regarding pediatric orthopaedic conditions. The purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of scoliosis misinformation on TikTok with a specific focus on what types of scoliosis content contain the most misinformation and which content creators produce the most videos containing this misinformation. Methods A comprehensive search was conducted on TikTok using the following hashtags: #scoliosis, #scoliosischiropractor, #scoliosisbrace, #scoliosissurgery. A total of 239 videos were reviewed over a 7-day peri

  19. Tri-Algo guardian ensemble approach for fake news detection in social media

    Borra Vineetha, M. Nirmala · 2025 · Journal of Big Data · 4 citations

    The rapid spread of misinformation in the digital age highlights the need for effective fake news classification systems. This research evaluates classification methods using multiple datasets, which present distinct challenges and features. Advanced preprocessing techniques enhance data quality, while various word embedding methods capture linguistic and contextual features. To address class imbalance, oversampling and class weighting strategies are applied. An ensemble approach integrates multiple models to improve classification accuracy. Results indicate that advanced embeddings achieve superior performance, while traditional methods remain computationally efficient. Ensemble models cons

  20. The Impact of Content Moderation Policy on the Spread of Fake News on Social Media in Indonesia

    Evy Febryani · 2025 · The Easta Journal Law and Human Rights · 3 citations

    This research investigates the impact of content moderation policies on the spread of hoax news on social media platforms in Indonesia, employing a normative legal analysis approach. The study examines the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks, such as the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE Law), and evaluates content moderation mechanisms employed by both the government and social media platforms. Findings indicate that while the ITE Law provides a legal basis for addressing misinformation, its vague provisions and potential for misuse have raised concerns regarding freedom of speech. Additionally, content moderation efforts by the government and social media platforms fa

  21. From Social Media to Global Misinformation: the Role of Citizen Journalism and Photojournalism in the Spread of False News Amid the Bangladesh Crisis -A Case Analysis

    A. Bhadra · 2024 · International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research · 3 citations

    In this digital age, social media platforms—particularly Facebook and X, the old Twitter—have emerged as the main venues for citizen journalism and photojournalism, particularly in times of crisis like the upheaval in Bangladesh. Social media facilitates real-time recordkeeping, but it also makes it simple to spread misinformation and fake news. During the Bangladesh crisis, the research used citizen-generated digital photographs and videos to dissect how false narratives were spread, echo chambers developed, and disinformation spread throughout the globe with a communal angle leading to the creating of dynamo effect of misinformation and polarization. This highlights the amplification of fa

  22. The Geometry of Misinformation: Embedding Twitter Networks of Users Who Spread Fake News in Geometrical Opinion Spaces

    Pedro Ramaciotti Morales, Manon Berriche, Jean-Philippe Cointet · 2023 · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 3 citations

    To understand why internet users spread fake news online, many studies have focused on individual drivers, such as cognitive skills, media literacy, or demographics. Recent findings have also shown the role of complex socio-political dynamics, highlighting that political polarization and ideologies are closely linked to a propensity to participate in the dissemination of fake news. Most of the existing empirical studies have focused on the US example by exploiting the self-reported or solicited positioning of users on a dichotomous scale opposing liberals with conservatives. Yet, left-right polarization alone is insufficient to study socio-political dynamics when considering non binary and m

  23. Analyzing the Interplay between Diversity of News Recommendations and Misinformation Spread in Social Media

    R. Pathak, F. Spezzano · 2024 · Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization · 2 citations

    Recommender systems play a crucial role in social media platforms, especially in the context of news, by assisting users in discovering relevant news. However, these systems can inadvertently contribute to increased personalization, and the formation of filter bubbles and echo chambers, thereby aiding in the propagation of fake news or misinformation. This study specifically focuses on examining the tradeoffs between the diversity of news recommendations and the dissemination of misinformation on social media. We evaluated classical recommender algorithms on two Twitter (now X) datasets to assess the diversity of top-10 recommendation lists and simulated the propagation of recommended misinf

  24. FAKE NEWS, MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION ABOUT COVID-19 IN SOCIAL MEDIA DURING THE PANDEMIC AND POST-PANDEMIC TIME (CASE OF GEORGIA)

    Dali Osepashvili · 2023 · International Journal of Innovative Technologies in Social Science · 2 citations

    Spreading fake news and disinformation is one of the global challenges over the last years. It is a challenge for Georgia too. This acute problem was also current at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a number of misinformation appear in the social media as well as in the traditional media, regarding the origin and spread of the coronavirus, especially in Facebook which is the most popular social network in Georgia. A lot of fake news was spread and is still being spread in the post-pandemic period too. The Goal of this research paper is to explore the attitudes of Georgian Facebook users, specifically what kind of fake news and disinformation they met about Coronavirus in social m

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