"We invited misinformation researchers to write a 250-word commentary about the research that they would hypothetically conduct if they had access to consenting participants’ social media data. The excerpts below provide concrete examples of studies that misinformation researchers could conduct, i
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f the community had better access to platforms’ data and processes. Based on the contents of the submission, we have grouped these brief excerpts into five areas that could be improved, and conclude with an excerpt regarding the importance of data sharing: 1. measurement and design, 2. who engages with misinformation and why, 3. unique datasets with increased validity, 4. disinformation campaigns, 5. interventions, and 6. the importance of data sharing. While these excerpts are not comprehensive and may not be representative of the field as a whole, our hope is that this multi-authored piece will further the conversation regarding the establishment of more evenly distributed collaborations between researchers and platforms." (Introduction)
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"It is paramount, MIT social media expert Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsized impact social media has on our culture, our democracy, and our lives in order to steer today's social technology toward good, while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Otherwise, we could fall victim to wha
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t Aral calls "The Hype Machine." As a senior researcher of the longest-running study of fake news ever conducted, Aral found that lies spread online farther and faster than the truth-a harrowing conclusion that was featured on the cover of Science magazine. Among the questions Aral explores following twenty years of field research: Did Russian interference change the 2016 election? And how is it affecting the vote in 2020? Why does fake news travel faster than the truth online? How do social ratings and automated sharing determine which products succeed and fail? How does social media affect our kids? First, Aral links alarming data and statistics to three accelerating social media shifts: hyper-socialization, personalized mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends. Next, he grapples with the consequences of the Hype Machine for elections, businesses, dating, and health." (Publisher description)
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"Analyzes current arguments and evidence while providing real-world examples so students can contextualize and visualize the debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis"--
"The handbook is a consensus document that was created by an innovative process that involved a series of predefined steps, all of which were followed and documented and are publicly available. The authors were invited based on their scientific status in the field, and they all agreed on all points
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made in the handbook. We therefore believe that the new Handbook reflects the scientific consensus about how to combat misinformation. Read more about the consensus process. The Handbook distills the most important research findings and current expert advice about debunking misinformation and contains information about these topics available in four excerpts." (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu)
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"[...] the purpose of this paper is to highlight the main models and elements that media in Albania manifest regarding hate speech, propaganda and disinformation. The research focuses mainly on online media, as they are identified as the main carriers of disinformation and hate speech, with a few ex
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ceptions, but traditional media are also present. The analysis is based on previous research studies, interviews with experts, and public statements and case studies, but mostly on the direct monitoring of models that are identified as manifesting problematic elements in the framework of this research. The content monitoring was carried out in the period June–August 2020, and focused on several media outlets and social media networks, mainly on particular narratives and case studies. The paper does not intend in any way to single out particular media, programmes or individuals, but rather to provide an overview of the main tendencies regarding hate speech, propaganda and disinformation in Albanian media, and also identify ways of countering these narratives." (Introduction)
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"Within Bosch Alumni Network, we have decided to seek for advice and expertise of media professionals dealing with fake news, disinformation and information verification. The result was “Fact check vs Fake news”, a three-day workshop on fake-news debunking and fact-checking that took place withi
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n the Bosch Alumni Network in Belgrade on September 19-22, 2019. During the event, around twenty journalists and media experts from a dozen different countries discussed the best tools and practises to tackle fake news and perform fact-checking. This booklet presents tips and tricks we learnt and discussed in the workshop." (Page 3)
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"We present Harmony Square, a short, free-to-play online game in which players learn how political misinformation is produced and spread. We find that the game confers psychological resistance against manipulation techniques commonly used in political misinformation: players from around the world fi
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nd social media content making use of these techniques significantly less reliable after playing, are more confident in their ability to spot such content, and less likely to report sharing it with others in their network." (Abstract)
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"WhatsApp is a key medium for the spread of news and rumors, often shared as images. We study a large collection of politically-oriented WhatsApp groups in India, focusing on the period leading up to the 2019 Indian national elections. By labeling samples of random and popular images, we find that a
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round 10% of shared images are known misinformation and most fall into three types of images. Machine learning methods can be used to predict whether a viral image is misinformation, but are brittle to shifts in content over time." (Abstract)
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"With over 30,000 confirmed cases, Brazil is currently the country most affected by COVID-19 in Latin America, and ranked 12th worldwide. Despite all evidence, a strong rhetoric undermining risks associated to COVID-19 has been endorsed at the highest levels of the Brazilian government, making Presi
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dent Jair Bolsonaro the leader of the “coronavirus-denial movement” (Friedman, 2020). To support this strategy, different forms of misinformation and disinformation2 have been leveraged to lead a dangerous crusade against scientific and evidence-based recommendations." (Abstract)
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"This paper provides an overview of current responses to fake news and digital disinformation inside and outside the EU, and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. Four approaches emerge: (1) self-regulation (i.e.actions undertaken on a voluntary basis by the digital platforms);
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(2) co-regulation (i.e.cooperation framework between EU-level and national-level authorities, the internet platform companies, media organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders); (3) direct regulation (i.e. legal measures & sanctions); and (4) audience-centred solutions (i.e. factchecking and media literacy). We argue in favour of the co-regulation approach, while drawing attention to some current challenges in the response against disinformation. Furthermore, we need to go beyond the understanding of disinformation as an information/truth fraud, and draw additional measures to reflect the particular understanding of disinformation as a form of users’ engagement fraud." (Abstract)
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"Este artigo visa analisar a cobertura dos meios de comunicação brasileiros nas eleições presidenciais realizadas no país a partir da redemocratização, começando com a de 1989 e finalizando com a de 2018. O estudo tomou como base teórica reflexões sobre desinformação, manipulação, fake
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news e democracia, sob a ótica de autores como Serrano (2008; 2010), Abramo (2003), Ramonet (2007), Luhmann (2005), Mello (2020), Bucci (2019), Bobbio (2006) e Casara (2018). A pesquisa mostra que historicamente a mídia tenta interferir no resultado das eleições, recorrendo a estratégias de manipulação e deturpação dos fatos, o que enfraquece o sistema democrático." (Abstract)
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"RT (formerly, Russia Today) is one of the most important organizations in the global political economy of disinformation. It is the most richly funded, well-staffed, formal organization in the world producing, disseminating, and marketing news in the service of the Kremlin. It is an agency accused
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of many things, but little is known about all the creative work involved in financing, governing, training, and motivating RT’s activities. To understand more about the production of political news and information by RT, we investigate its organizational behavior through in-depth interviews of current and former staff. Our data show that RT is an opportunist channel that is used as an instrument of state defense policy to meddle in the politics of other states. The channel has been established in the shadows of the Soviet media system and its organizational behavior is characterized by Soviet-style controls." (Abstract)
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"Full Fact first started working with Facebook on the Third-Party Fact-Checking programme in January 2019. When we joined the programme we committed to reporting regularly on its operation. Our first report, published in July 2019, covered January to June 2019.1 This second report details our experi
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ence from July 2019 to December 2020 [...] Broadly, our views are that: This is a valuable programme. It made a significant difference to our ability to tackle misinformation during the 2019 UK election, and to Facebook’s ability to respond. Facebook’s global network of fact checking partners meant it had options for responding to misinformation related to the pandemic that other internet companies did not have. Other internet companies should emulate the Third-Party Fact-Checking programme. In particular, from what we can tell, YouTube stands out as particularly being able to benefit from a similar programme to the Third-Party Fact-Checking programme. A partnership such as the Third-Party Fact-Checking programme can only be one part of an effective response to misinformation and disinformation. Other decisions the internet companies make are critical and need scrutiny and oversight: from product design, to advertising standards, to rules for user behaviour. Our two main concerns continue to be transparency and scale. Explaining the programme and its results is Facebook’s responsibility. These independent reports from Full Fact seek to add to the information Facebook provides, not act as a substitute. Most internet companies are trying to use AI to scale fact checking and none is doing so in a transparent way with independent assessment. This is a growing concern." (Introduction, page 5-6)
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"[This publication] uses the term ‘disinformation’ to describe false or misleading content with potentially harmful consequences, irrespective of the underlying intentions or behaviours in producing and circulating such messages. The focus is not on definitions, but on how States, companies, ins
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titutions and organisations around the world are responding to this phenomenon, broadly conceived. The work includes a novel typology of 11 responses, making holistic sense of the disinformation crisis on an international scale, including during COVID-19. It also provides a 23-step tool developed to assess disinformation responses, including their impact on freedom of expression. The research concludes that disinformation cannot be addressed in the absence of freedom of expression concerns, and it explains why actions to combat disinformation should support, and not violate, this right. It also underlines that access to reliable and trustworthy information, such as that produced by critical independent journalism, is a counter to disinformation. Additionally, the study has produced a framework for capturing the complete disinformation life cycle - from instigation and creation, to the means of propagation, to real-life impact, with reference to: 1. Instigators 2. Agents 3. Messages 4. Intermediaries 5. Targets/Interpreters - shortened to the acronym ‘IAMIT’." (Executive summary, page 8)
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"Misinformation is a lucrative business in several Eastern European countries, reliant on advertising revenue, and pulling in cash from a variety of other sources including government subsidies, crowdfunding, tax designations, donations and sales of merchandise. The Business of Misinformation projec
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t, run by the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS), set out in its first phase to map the misinformation business in six countries: Bosnia & Herzegovina, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. Our researches identified the individuals and businesses that own local misinformation websites and their links to institutions, parties and other individuals." (Publisher description)
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"Any technology that can be used to generate false or misleading content, from photocopiers and Photoshop software to deep fakes, can be weaponised. This paper argues that policymakers face a narrowing window of opportunity to minimise the consequences of weaponised deep fakes. Any response must inc
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lude measures across three lines of effort: 1. investment in and deployment of deep fake detection technologies; 2. changing online behaviour, including via policy measures that empower digital audiences to critically engage with content and that bolster trusted communication channels; 3. creation and enforcement of digital authentication standards." (Page 4)
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"Disinformation tactics and the responses in place to try to mitigate them online are changing rapidly. Organisations witnessing or targeted by disinformation therefore require a baseline understanding of the threats posed by disinformation and how to spot them while conducting their work. This tool
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kit sets out simple steps to do so. The toolkit lays out an approach that organisations can undertake to begin to track online disinformation on subjects that they care about. The process is intended to have a very low barrier to entry, with each stage achievable using either over-the-counter or free-to-use social listening tools." (Publisher description)
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