Combating Misinformation Online

How did we arrive at a moment where misinformation and conspiracy theories can reshape healthcare decisions and public policy? The Economy of Distrust offers a clear, evidence-based exploration of the historical roots and modern mechanisms that fuel skepticism toward science and medicine.

Drawing on case studies from the Black Death to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Milan Toma traces the recurring cycles of distrust created by institutional failures, profit-driven scandals, and communication breakdowns. The book unpacks how events like the Radithor radioactive tonic scandal, the Tuskegee experiments, and the opioid crisis have left lasting scars, setting the stage for today’s viral spread of health myths and conspiracy thinking.

Rather than accepting simple narratives, Dr. Toma explains how and why common medical myths and conspiracy theories arise, how they are exploited for profit, and what the real evidence shows. With accessible explanations, he explores:
The historical origins of enduring medical myths and how they gain traction
Key moments of institutional failure and their role in fostering public skepticism
The complex psychology that allows misinformation to persist, even in the face of overwhelming evidence
The roles of media, social platforms, and modern “wellness” industries in amplifying and monetizing distrust
Why marginalized communities, shaped by historical trauma, are especially vulnerable to predatory pseudoscience
How algorithmic and AI-driven communication can accelerate cycles of misinformation
Practical, system-level strategies for rebuilding public trust, improving science communication, and promoting critical thinking
The Economy of Distrust is not a catalogue of conspiracies, but an in-depth look at the real forces behind them. It provides readers with the context to understand why misinformation spreads and offers constructive approaches for addressing it. Dr. Toma’s commitment to evidence-based analysis ensures that every claim is rooted in verifiable research, making this book a valuable resource for healthcare professionals, educators, journalists, and anyone seeking to make sense of our current information landscape.

If you want to understand the historical and social patterns that have brought us to this point—and how we can move toward a more resilient, informed, and equitable future—The Economy of Distrust provides the clarity and insight needed for both understanding and action.

In this article I describe my teaching experience as an early-career instructor regarding misinformation about archaeological practice. Applying concepts from inoculation theory, I suggest a proactive and constructive approach to teach students to identify pseudoarchaeologies for themselves.

In these times of danger of severe international conflicts with fear of the use of atomic weapons and accidents in nuclear power plants, radionuclide contamination in terrestrial ecosystems has nowadays reached a dangerous level. One of the most frequent and studied artificial radionuclide is cesium (137-Cs and 134-Cs), which is on the rise in the world. This orally ingested artificial radionuclide is a serious danger that can cause, in humans and animals, through inflammatory, carcinogenic, carcinogenic, necrotic mechanisms, functional deficiency as diabetes mellitus, cancer and congenital anomalies by DNA and mitochondrial damage. The Author reported autoradiographic and scintigraphic studies describing some, little-known, damage to organs of pancreas, salivary glands, colon, ovary and diabetes mellitus, whose incidence rate is gradually rising worldwide. But a controversy on tissues and organs damaged, by Low-Dose Radiations action, is frequently reported in medical literature.

India, known for its remarkable unity in diversity with numerous languages, religions, and traditions, faces significant challenges in information dissemination. Its linguistic variety, along with widespread digital platforms and varying levels of digital literacy, has created an environment where fake news can thrive. Despite the emergence of fact-checking initiatives, nearly 45% of people in a 2018 survey were unaware of these efforts. Recent surveys also highlight false information as India's highest risk, surpassing other critical issues. This research analyses the characteristics of fake news in India by examining debunked stories from 10 fact-checking outlets. The goal is to understand the nature and distribution of fake news, offering insights to improve strategies against misinformation and enhance efforts to protect Indian society from its adverse effects.

Lord Roberts had reviewed the events of 710 for the APPG (Israel). It can be found here. We have both a long review and a short review. We have argued that in many places the report is mistaken and misleading and that it's chief aim is to obscure Israel's implementation of the Hannibal Directive, particularly in the border region that was turned into an "extermination zone" by the IAF gunning down "anything that moved." Because many more hostages were taken than is usually admitted, as indicated by the fact that early on they were considered missing, and because these were later located dead, we can infer that Israel killed many on 710. This is true of the British victims, and here we will argue that the Roberts Report (TRR) egregiously tried to obscure their fate.

The aim of this article is an attempt to distinguish features of electronic publications and motives on the basis of which one can speak about the phenomenon of post-truth. An important element is also the indication of tools used by modern media administrators, but also creators-prosumers. The media, which are now closer to the postmodern idea of aestheticisation of life, seem to effectively redefine the concept of truth. The presentation and analysis of several selected examples of false information will let us understand the essence of the functioning of mediatised messages. The formulation of trivial content saturated with emphasis and sensationalism is an essential feature of media discourse. As a result of the excess and inflation of messages, it becomes impossible to differentiate between reliable and true news and lies. In other words, new media make it possible for almost all of us to participate in the creation of (collective) culture. Cyberspace, in which the information society currently operates, enforces changes in the use of digital media, but also creates numerous threats for the modern recipient-it causes changes in the behaviour, but also in the awareness of new media users.

Members of Be'eri Kibbutz Initially considered Kidnapped but likely Killed by the IAF Many civilians were kidnapped from Be'eri on 7 October. This note will assemble a list of names of civilians who with good reason were initially believed to be kidnapped, but who were later confirmed dead. In some instances these deaths are accompanied by deeply implausible accounts from Israel as to the cause of death, naturally suggesting that they had been victims of the IAF. Official sources now admit that the border region was turned into an extermination zone, the IAF being ordered to "gun down anything that moved," and that nearly 1000 strikes were made. Such knowledge invites a revision of the earlier versions of events. It's true that some names below may have died at Be'eri, perhaps from Israeli weapons systems, as it is reported that tanks went from house to house and that helicopters fired at the kibbutz. But even so, it looks to us as though dozens of people were kidnapped and killed by the IAF, roughly the same number as those who we know were kidnapped safely (32 according to the IDF via TOI). This is very much in line with what we suppose-that the journey into the extermination zone afforded a 50% chance of survival (or less). Biographies of individuals can be found in the Times of Israel, "Those we have lost" column, but we can point out straight away a useful compilation in The Guardian dating from 18 October that mentions several Be'eri victims. 1

The paper attempts to answer the following three questions:
• What is the methodology do Pakistani fact-checkers adopt for fact-checking a claim?
• How do Pakistani fact-checkers uphold transparency in their fact-checking methodology?
• What were the characteristics of fact-checked stories flagged for misinformation during the 2024 election?

The false or misleading claims fact checked by Soch Fact Check and AFP Pakistan Fact Check reveal that PTI and PML-N were the focus of most of the claims flagged for misinformation. The paper explains that fact checking by both fact checkers is conducted in a systematic and transparent manner.

We will identify around 120 Israelis at the Nova Party who were killed after attending the music festival and who were listed in the 364 names but who were not collected by Zaka from the site originally. Our conclusion means that only 240 bodies, or perhaps less, could have been recovered in the first two days, contrary to what was widely reported, namely that 260 bodies were found by 9 October. However, we will present an astonishing revelation from a representative of the Chief of Staff that confirms our conclusion. The relevant interview reported by Kan News reveals that a number of bodies were “dumped” at Re’im in the first 24 hours after 220-230 were initially retrieved. We go on to present some images of some corpses “burnt beyond recognition” arriving in a truck that likely captures the “dumping,” and we speculate that these may have been the first arrivals from the “extermination zone,” the remainder being collected early that week (thus causing a massive spike in the total death toll).

This study systematically analyzes and compares verification
strategies employed by fact-checking organizations across various
contexts. Utilizing a dataset of 3,154 verification articles from 23
organizations in eight countries across Europe and Latin America,
the study identifies 17 distinct debunking techniques through both
inductive and deductive approaches. The primary objectives are to
uncover common and divergent practices in factual correction,
assess how techniques vary by verification target (e.g., online
rumors versus statements by public figures), and examine
variations at organizational and national levels. The findings reveal
that while methods such as providing documents and tracing
misinformation origins are prevalent, significant variation exists
depending on the target. For online rumors, common practices
include tracing misinformation origins, forensic analysis, and visual
indicators of image manipulation. Conversely, verification of public
figure statements frequently involves expert arbitration and direct
contact with misinformation sources. Additionally, the study
highlights substantial differences in fact-checking strategies across
countries and organizations, influenced by their focus and
institutional contexts. This research addresses a notable gap in the
literature by offering a comparative analysis of verification
strategies, providing a framework for future experimental research,
and offering guidance for fact-checkers and scholars to refine their
approaches to combating misinformation

WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging application in many countries such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia, where many people use it as the main interface to the Web. Recently, WhatsApp has been pointed as an important actor in the spreading of misinformation. However, due to its encrypted and peer-to-peer nature, it is hard for people to explore the content people share within WhatsApp at scale. In this work, we propose the Monitor de WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp-monitor.dcc.ufmg.br/), a web-based system that helps researchers and journalists explore the nature of content shared on WhatsApp public groups from three different contexts: Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Our tool monitors multiple content categories such as images, videos, audio, and textual messages posted on a set of WhatsApp groups and displays the most shared content ranked per day. Our tool has been used for monitoring content during the 2018 Brazilian Elections to the COVID-19 pandemics and was one of the ma...

Just before noon at the Nova music festival a CCTV camera captured the moment when three cars exploded, with the middle car particularly bursting into flames. We will geolocate both the place where the three cars exploded and the position of the camera.

Recent years have witnessed rapid advancements in the fields of Information Technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which have made very complex and complicated tasks very easy for us. Along with this, they have given rise to an alarming phenomenon i.e. Deep Fake Videos (DFV). While these videos may seem innocuous at first glance, concerns have been raised about the potential consequences of their misuse, particularly when it comes to creating fake content featuring national or international leaders. Reason for this fear is that such videos could be exploited to incite unrest among communities, civilizations, nations, and ideologies, leading to very dangerous consequences on the stability of countries and even the world.

Since 7 October I have written several articles pertaining to the friendly fire/ Hannibal Directive and placed them on my Academia site (for Chris S Friel). However, about three weeks ago (it is now Mayday) I noticed that some of them are invisible to Google Searches. Having now gotten round to looking more closely I can definitely affirm that particular searches result in bizarre hits, even as other search engines such as Bing are perfectly fine - as Google is for many of the articles. I have tried to contact Google to get to the bottom of this anomaly.

I will critically review a BBC documentary fronted by Lyse Doucet, The Darkest Days.

The hour-long documentary focuses on the Nova festival in the first half hour (before turning to Gaza). In our exposition we will concentrate on this section, and then offer some critical remarks pertaining to the question of friendly fire.

We will argue that four particular cars that were burned at the Nova music festival were likely hit not by Hamas but by Israel. We have discussed some images of the destruction twice, thinking that the cars were white (Toyota) PickUp trucks, the kind used by Hamas, which indicated to us that they could hardly have been attacked with RPGs, but when we came across close-ups, we had to preface our studies with "partial retractions," and are now attempting a clearer restatement. We will begin with an image taken by Ilan Rosenberg for Reuters on 12 October: .

WhatsApp is the most popular communication application in many developing countries such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, where many people use it as an interface to the web. Due to its encrypted and peer-to-peer nature feature, it is hard for researchers to study which content people share through WhatsApp at scale. In this demo paper, we propose What-sApp Monitor (http://www.whatsapp-monitor.dcc.ufmg.br/), a web-based system that helps researchers and journalists explore the nature of content shared on WhatsApp public groups from two different contexts: Brazil and India. Our tool monitors multiple content categories such as images, videos, audio, and textual messages posted on a set of WhatsApp groups and displays the most shared content per day. Our tool has been used for monitoring content during the 2018 Brazilian general election and was one of the major sources for estimating the spread of misinformation and helping fact-checking efforts.

Recently, messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, have been reportedly abused by misinformation campaigns, especially in Brazil and India. A notable form of abuse in What-sApp relies on several manipulated images and memes containing all kinds of fake stories. In this work, we performed an extensive data collection from a large set of WhatsApp publicly accessible groups and fact-checking agency websites. This paper opens a novel dataset to the research community containing fact-checked fake images shared through What-sApp for two distinct scenarios known for the spread of fake news on the platform: the 2018 Brazilian elections and the 2019 Indian elections.

Organisational Managers are continuously striving to gather, filter and analyse to make informed decisions on behalf of their organisation's marketing, human resource, production, finance and other functions of the organisation. The deluge of information interference through the Social Media and the associated mix of real and fake information has become an obstacle to making information decision. This study is an attempt to explore the effect of the constructs-Personal Reputation, Employer Reputation, Law Enforcement, Personality and the mediating effect of Personal Gratification on the believe and propagation of Fake News that made up the study model. The study adopted a triangulated approach to data collection by carrying out content analysis of the staff communication in a WhatsApp group of The Nigerian Army University in North East Nigeria. A two-stagesurvey approach was also adopted on a sample obtained from the members of this group. Though the survey result and the content analysis conflicted, additional study of the behaviours of the group members on the platform reveals that both higher and lower cadre employees of this WhatsApp group prefer personal popularity over protecting their personal reputation and that of their employer and have little or no concern about the outcome of their attitudes. Observed empirical attitudeson the platform are positively significant. The study suggests actions to be taken by the Management of the institution. The study also made recommendations for future studies as stated in the recommendation section of this study.

Fake news, misinformation, disinformation, mal-information and of course hate speech creates a reactive impact on democracy, freedom of expression, pluralism and secularism.
Misinformation should not be confused with the quality of journalism and the circulation of trustworthy information which complies with professional standards and ethics.
Misinformation has rather become increasingly more powerful as they are fuelled by new technologies and rapid online dissemination. The consequence is that digitally‑driven fake news and misinformation, in contexts of polarization, risks eclipsing quality journalism, and the truth.
Often talkshow-wallas blame the low-literacy rate in South Asia, the grassroots population and so-called ill-informed people for spreading fake news and hate speech. Apparently, it is not at all correct!
In South Asia, political scientists agree that the majority of people, not necessarily the ‘aam-janta’ (mango people) but also the urban elites and politicians succumb to believing in fake news and rumours, without giving it a second thought.
The mindset of people tends to believe in fake news, justifying that the source is from a responsible citizen, credible group of persons, and news organisation.
Most fake news, misinformation and disinformation have been generated during the coronavirus pandemic which created havoc in life, livelihood and the economy.
The pandemic has impacted social development and the human development index. The pandemic has challenged democracy and pluralism in South Asia – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Most of the fake news was spread primarily through social media. Secondly, online news portals, and third was inter-personal communication – be it mobile phones or other

In contrast to prior individuum-focused interventions, the online randomized controlled trial presented here motivated young adults through family bonds to build resistance against fake news. This preregistered study is the first psychological fake news intervention in Eastern Europe, where the free press is weak and state-sponsored misinformation runs riot in mainstream media. In this intervention, participants were endowed with an expert role and requested to write a letter to their digitally less competent relatives explaining six strategies that help fake news recognition. Compared to the active control group there was an immediate effect (d=0.32) that persisted until the follow-up four weeks later (d=0.22) on fake news accuracy ratings. The intervention also reduced the bullshit receptivity of participants both immediately after the intervention and in the long run. The present work demonstrates the power of using relevant social bonds for motivating behavior change among Easte...

The Swedish phrase "sanningssägare"-literally, "truth-tellers"-offers an intriguing window to the world of social media in our times. Lately, it has been absorbed by and used to describe a person who says something that they might think should be 'the truth' in a context when others don't really care about what is true or false. In digital on the digital spread of coverage from national elections, right-wing candidates and their supporters have proclaimed to be "tellers of the real truth"-an euphemism for tellers of "alternative facts". Thus, in the digital politics characterising our times, the word "sanningssägare" has been used frequently in tweets and posts to comments that are seen as "outspoken", "fabricated" or a combination of both. Between 7 and 9 September 2018, a group of international media scholars and journalists gathered in a co-working space in the old dockyard of Hammarby in central Stockholm. Outnumbered by Swedish journalism students, the group consisted of Finnish fact-checkers, British and US media entrepreneurs, Swedish and Indian media scholars and journalism teachers. This diverse group's mission was to monitor the spread of misinformation and dis-information on social media during the Swedish national elections. The first concern about fake news is the term itself. Terming it "fake" assumes, like in a painting, there exists somewhere an "original", and hence a true, version-of which one or more versions are fake, or unsanctioned, or illegitimate renditions. It is more accurate to term this misleading practice as False News-so there is no ambiguity about its veracity, at any level. The more magnanimous define "fake news" to be "fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent" (David et al 2018) 1. Journalists intervene in such debates by emphasising the distinction between reportage that is unverified and that which is knowingly false. Definitional clarity is crucial as it brings us to squarely eyeball that what we are dealing with is falsity, process or otherwise. We are not dealing with versions of reportage or opinion-yours, mine, or theirs-but plain and simple falsehood. The second concern around False News is that it is not really a mistake-either by a lowly paid reporter, a semiskilled sub-editor, an overworked newsroom, or even a celebrity news anchor. False News is a business-as much as it is politics. In India the situation in 2017 was markedly different as among the top 'Fake News' stories circulated by the mainstream media that year, none concerned party politics (Jawed 2018) 2. The omnipresence of False News suggests, foremost, that in our times the business of truth seems to have few takers than that of falsity. Or to put it in another way, the market-the proverbial arbitrator in

Online defamation, doxing, and impersonation are three of the major problems of the internet age. As technology advances, these become greater problems. These problems can cause serious damage to victims. This research chapter makes recommendations on how to educate the public to deal with online defamation, doxing, and impersonation. It concludes by proposing a field called "misinformation identification engineering" to develop algorithms and software to find, flag, or remove misinformation and disinformation on websites and in other documents.

Fact-checking has been granted a pivotal role in mitigating the effects of online disinformation, but its effectiveness has nonetheless been questioned (Lee and Shin 2019). Like any persuasive communication, fact checkers depend on their recipients perceiving both their messages and them as credible (Lombardi, Seyranian, and Sinatra 2014; Lombardi, Nussbaum, and Sinatra 2016). This study investigates the role of the perceived credibility of the fact checker as possible detriment to the effectiveness of fact-checking efforts by means of an online survey-embedded experiment. Results show that the perceived credibility of the fact checker and fact-checking messages is best explained by normative expectations of the roles of fact checkers and trust in traditional media. Some users perceive fact checkers as elite power structures in journalism or, in other words, as collaborative-facilitators for state propaganda (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018; see also Fawzi 2020). Further, low trust in media and politics predicts perceived credibility of disinformation better than political partisanship. The findings suggest that fact checkers should be more transparent and proactive in communicating their motives and identities. Further implications are discussed.

With billions of monthly active users, Facebook has an unprecedented ability for the dissemination of information. In healthcare, attempts have been made to utilize this tool for goals such as predicting disease onset; however, shared articles that omit information or propagate incorrect statements may have a negative effect. The goal of this study was to assess the accuracy of information in the nascent months of the 2019-2020 Covid-19 outbreak.The fifty most popular articles on Facebook for the period between November 2019 and March 25, 2020 (as collated by Buzzsumo- a social media analyzing tool) were analyzed by independent researchers and sorted into classifications for accurate, inaccurate and misleading. Following evaluation, 32% of articles were deemed to be accurate, 18% inaccurate, and 50% misleading (as defined by containing both accurate and inaccurate information). To restate, 68% of the 50 most popular articles on Facebook were not accurate during the study period. Imp...

Interest in the psychology of misinformation has exploded in recent years. Despite ample research, to date there is no validated framework to measure misinformation susceptibility. Therefore, we introduce Verification done, a nuanced interpretation schema and assessment tool that simultaneously considers Veracity discernment, and its distinct, measurable abilities (real/fake news detection), and biases (distrust/naïvité—negative/positive judgment bias). We then conduct three studies with seven independent samples (Ntotal = 8,504) to show how to develop, validate, and apply a Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST). In Study 1 (N = 409) we use a neural network language model to generate items, and use three psychometric methods—factor analysis, item response theory, and exploratory graph analysis—to create the MIST-20 (20 items; completion time <2 minutes), the MIST-16 (16 items; <2 minutes), and the MIST-8 (8 items; <1 minute). In Study 2 (N = 7,674) we confirm the intern...

Nous assistons à l’émergence d’une nouvelle génération de désinformation qui chamboule nos repères.

En effet, l’inquiétude provoquée par la popularité croissante des deepfakes, ou hypertrucages malveillants, ont amené l’auteure et conseillère spécialisée en médias synthétiques, Nina Schick, à annoncer l’imminence d’une infocalypse.

Les hypertrucages sont des enregistrements audio et vidéo de personnes réelles prononçant et exécutant des choses qu’elles n’ont jamais dites ou faites, créés à l’aide des algorithmes d’apprentissage automatique.

Par exemple, le Dalí Museum a réussi l’exploit de faire revivre synthétiquement Salvador Dalí pour qu’il puisse accueillir les visiteurs lors de son exposition et prendre un selfie, ou égoportrait, avec eux.

Access to abundant information affordably and instantaneously has been the
most empowering feature of the ‘Information Age’. Nonetheless, it results in rampant
spread of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, hate speech, defamatory
remarks, and rumours by actors like troll farms, cyber troops, fake news syndicates, bot networks, hard-line religious groups, political parties, and even by some governments. This has given rise to an ‘Information Disorder’, particularly in cyberspace, which has been affecting different parts of the world in varied magnitude. South and Southeast Asia need particular focus in this regard as the countries have faced severe real-life impacts like vigilantism, mob killings, hate speech instigating attacks on minority communities, revenge attacks surrounding religious defamation, etc. Moreover, it has ramifications for democracy, law and order situation, and national security. In this backdrop, the paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of the nature and extent of information disorder in these two regions by studying the actors, tactics, and impacts. Both primary and secondary sources are used in the study. Using a contextualized framework, the paper identifies the major actors, their motivations, and the kind of content created and disseminated by them. It finds that the underlying social, political, and economic factors, particularly the religious, ethnic, and racial fault lines play a key role in the process. Changes in the political environment and media landscape, technological transformation, and the business model of online platforms are also major factors. Although the problem is country-specific, there are transnational and regional implications as well. In this regard, the paper suggests some proactive, reactive, immediate, and long-term approaches that can be adopted by the countries individually, through regional collaboration, and by participating in global advocacy.

In this paper, we present a dataset of 713k articles collected between 02/2018-11/2018. These articles are collected directly from 194 news and media outlets including mainstream, hyper-partisan, and conspiracy sources. We incorporate ground truth ratings of the sources from 8 different assessment sites covering multiple dimensions of veracity, including reliability, bias, transparency, adherence to journalistic standards, and consumer trust. The NELA-GT-2018 dataset can be found at this https URL.

Several researchers have attempted to investigate the processes that govern and support the spread of fake news. This paper collates and identifies these variables. This paper then categorises these variables based on three key players that are involved in the process: Users, Content, and Social Networks. The authors conducted an extensive review of the literature and a reflection on the key variables that are involved in the process. The paper has identified a total of twenty-seven variables. Then the paper presents a series of tasks to mitigate or eliminate these variables in a holistic process that could be automated to reduce or eliminate fake news propagation. Finally, the paper suggests further research into testing the method in lab conditions.

Several researchers have attempted to investigate the processes that govern and support the spread of fake news. This paper collates and identifies these variables. This paper then categorises these variables based on three key players that are involved in the process: Users, Content, and Social Networks. The authors conducted an extensive review of the literature and a reflection on the key variables that are involved in the process. The paper has identified a total of twenty-seven variables. Then the paper presents a series of tasks to mitigate or eliminate these variables in a holistic process that could be automated to reduce or eliminate fake news propagation. Finally, the paper suggests further research into testing the method in lab conditions.

Purpose In March 2019, Facebook updated its security procedures requesting ID verification for people who wish to advertise or promote political posts of adverts. The announcement received little media coverage even though it is an interesting development in the battle against fake news. This paper aims to review the current literature on different approaches in the battle against the spread of fake news, including the use of computer algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and introduction of ID checks. Design/methodology/approach Critical to the evaluation is consideration into ID checks as a means to combat the spread of fake news. To understand the process and how it works, the team undertook a social experiment combined with reflective analysis to better understand the impact of ID check policies when combined with other standards policies of a typical platform. Findings The analysis identifies grave concerns. In a wider context, standardising such policy will leave political ...

Misinformation and disinformation online is one of the great problems of our time. The digital era has enabled new and increasingly complex communication systems to flourish. Information flows across vast distances instantly and people are more interconnected than ever before. This also means that information which is inaccurate, misleading or objectively false can also travel at unprecedented rates, and often travels faster and farther than objectively truthful content. This information contaminates the online landscape and impacts people’s ability to discern accurate and truthful content. Misinformation and disinformation is often more sensationalized, which often leads to it being engaged with more often on platforms, this can in turn cause it to become favoured by algorithms. These algorithms tend to prioritize popular content to maintain users on platforms longer and exposes them to more advertisements, in order to gain advertising revenue.
This research used interviews, a survey and an extensive literature review to understand the spread of misinformation and disinformation in Canadian society today, and to map this using a systems approach. Following this, strategic foresight tools were used to generate potential future scenarios with the goal of making strategic recommendations for the current context.

Health related misinformation can have devastating effects on individuals, their family and society at large. Although many great initiatives against misinformation exist, the problem remains unsolved to date. This white paper aims to better understand the causes & drivers of creating, distributing and consuming health misinformation. For this, key psychological and technological biases are analyzed regarding their impact on the consumption and distribution of health misinformation in social networks. Further their interplay with different solution approaches, namely the flagging & removal of misinformation versus the highlighting of high quality information, is explored.
Following the research recommendations of public health authorities like the WHO, the TRUSTMEDICOS project strives to contribute to solving this problem with a transparent blockchain based trust and reputation model that uses a reporting & reviewing mechanism conducted by social network users and trusted health experts. The developed solution concept design and our research findings are presented and their potential to support the fight against misinformation is discussed.

There is currently no easy way to discover potentially problematic content on WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted platforms at scale. In this paper, we analyze the usefulness of a crowd-sourced tipline through which users can submit content (“tips”) that they want fact-checked. We compared the tips sent to a WhatsApp tipline run during the 2019 Indian general election with the messages circulating in large, public groups on WhatsApp and other social media platforms during the same period. We found that tiplines are a very useful lens into WhatsApp conversations: a significant fraction of messages and images sent to the tipline match with the content being shared on public WhatsApp groups and other social media. Our analysis also shows that tiplines cover the most popular content well, and a majority of such content is often shared to the tipline before appearing in large, public WhatsApp groups. Overall, our findings suggest tiplines can be an effective source for discovering po...

Given the recent proliferation of false claims online, there has been a lot of manual fact-checking effort. As this is very timeconsuming, human fact-checkers can benefit from tools that can support them and make them more efficient. Here, we focus on building a system that could provide such support. Given an input document, it aims to detect all sentences that contain a claim that can be verified by some previously factchecked claims (from a given database). The output is a reranked list of the document sentences, so that those that can be verified are ranked as high as possible, together with corresponding evidence. Unlike previous work, which has looked into claim retrieval, here we take a document-level perspective. We create a new manually annotated dataset for the task, and we propose suitable evaluation measures. We further experiment with a learning-to-rank approach, achieving sizable performance gains over several strong baselines. Our analysis demonstrates the importance ...

WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging application in many countries such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia, where many people use it as the main interface to the Web. Recently, WhatsApp has been pointed as an important actor in the spreading of misinformation. However, due to its encrypted and peer-to-peer nature, it is hard for people to explore the content people share within WhatsApp at scale. In this work, we propose the Monitor de WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp-monitor.dcc.ufmg.br/), a web-based system that helps researchers and journalists explore the nature of content shared on WhatsApp public groups from three different contexts: Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Our tool monitors multiple content categories such as images, videos, audio, and textual messages posted on a set of WhatsApp groups and displays the most shared content ranked per day. Our tool has been used for monitoring content during the 2018 Brazilian Elections to the COVID-19 pandemics and was one of the ma...

We present a novel end-to-end memory network for stance detection, which jointly (i) predicts whether a document agrees, disagrees, discusses or is unrelated with respect to a given target claim, and also (ii) extracts snippets of evidence for that prediction. The network operates at the paragraph level and integrates convolutional and recurrent neural networks, as well as a similarity matrix as part of the overall architecture. The experimental evaluation on the Fake News Challenge dataset shows state-of-the-art performance.

To ascertain how absence/presence of consequence (IV1) and educational attainment (IV2) affects misinformation detection (DV), this study will employ an independent between-subjects factorial design method of true experimental research with 3 x 3 levels.

March 2019, Facebook updated its security procedures requesting ID verification for people who wish to advertise or promote political posts of adverts. The announcement received little media coverage even though it is an interesting development in the battle against Fake News. This paper reviews the current literature on different approaches in the battle against the spread of fake news, including the use of computer algorithms, A.I, and introduction of ID checks. Critical to the evaluation is consideration into ID checks as a means to combat the spread of Fake News. To understand the process and how it works, the team undertook a social experiment combined with reflective analysis to understand the impact of ID check policies better when combined with other standards policies of a typical platform. The analysis identifies grave concerns. In a wider context, standardising such policy will leave political activists in countries vulnerable to reprisal from authoritarian regimes. Other impacts include people who use fake names to protect the identity of adopted children or to protect anonymity from abusive partners. The analysis also points to the fact that troll arms could bypass these checks rendering the use of ID checks less effective in the battle to combat fake news.

Recently, messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, have been reportedly abused by misinformation campaigns, especially in Brazil and India. A notable form of abuse in WhatsApp relies on several manipulated images and memes containing all kinds of fake stories. In this work, we performed an extensive data collection from a large set of WhatsApp publicly accessible groups and fact-checking agency websites. This paper opens a novel dataset to the research community containing fact-checked fake images shared through WhatsApp for two distinct scenarios known for the spread of fake news on the platform: the 2018 Brazilian elections and the 2019 Indian elections.