Today's media society allows young people to come into contact with news through their everyday use of social media. News is interspersed between the friends' photos on the Instagram platform. But can everything be trusted? How do young people know what is true news and what is fake? The phenomenon of fake news refers to disinformation that is published with the aim of imitating true news articles. Thus the purpose of the study is to investigate how the use of social media has affected young Swedes' civic reasoning of news and what the consequences of fake news on Instagram may be. To investigate this, the demonstrations in Iran that started in September 2022, and which were ongoing during the study, were used as a starting point to understand how young people examine Instagram posts.The study has been carried out by compiling qualitative data, mainly from surveys, but also with quantitative data from five semi-structured interviews. The results provided an overall picture of young people's perception of fake news and an insight into what young Swedes' civic reasoning process looks like. The conclusion shows that fake news in connection with the demonstrations in Iran did not affect all young people equally. Some felt that the knowledge of fake news negatively affected their perception of the credibility of any news from the demonstrations. While others, due to the strong emotions the event evoked, saw past the problem of fake news, which affected their civic reasoning abilities. The conclusion also shows that young Swedes have a good idea of what fake news is and the motives behind the spread of fake news on Instagram. However, they feel that the credibility of true news generally decreases, as it is easy to spread fake news on Instagram. This, in turn, can lead to young people avoiding news and news accounts on Instagram to avoid questioning and reviewing news posts they see.In conclusion, young people possess civic reasoning abilities and review posts that they consider skeptical. However, these abilities vary and it is therefore important that they develop their source-critical process, above all as this is essential to be able to navigate among information online.

[pt] A popularização da Internet no final da década de 1990 inaugurou uma nova dinâmica de comunicação e de consumo de informações. Indivíduos que antes consumiam notícias editoradas de forma passiva tornaram-se também produtores de informações, que, por sua vez, passaram a ser disponibilizadas de forma instantânea e abundante. Propõe-se observar a dinâmica regulatória da liberdade de expressão e acesso à informação nesses novos espaços, inicialmente privados, mas que assumem características de arena pública, de interlocução e deliberação pautado em um modelo não Estatal. O objeto principal dessa análise é o chamado fenômeno da desinformação que, apesar de não se iniciar com e por causa da Internet, encontra nela o ambiente propício para sua rápida disseminação e com potencial de viralização. Por meio de estudo da legislação pertinente e com uso de metodologia qualitativa, procedeu-se à análise de doutrina interdisciplinar sobre o tema. O estudo agrupou as legislações e projetos de lei brasileiros que incidem na regulamentação do tema. Constatou a carência de recursos legais para regular o problema. Observou possibilidades de interlocução entre esferas legislativas, sociais, tecnológicas e mercadológicas. Concluiu que parcerias reguladas se efetivam no cotidiano e que para tal, é necessário também, postura participativa e envolvimento de diferentes atores sociais. / [en] The popularization of the Internet in late 1990s started a new dynamic of communication and information access. Individuals who used to consume edited news in a passive manner also became information producers, turning information available instantly and abundantly. The present work proposes to observe the regulatory dynamics of freedom of expression and information access in these new spaces, which are initially private, but assume characteristics of a public arena, of dialogue and deliberation based on a non-State model. The main object of this analysis is the so-called phenomenon of disinformation which, despite not starting with and because of the Internet, finds in it the favorable environment for its rapid dissemination and the potential to become viral. Through a study of the relevant legislation and using a qualitative methodology, the interdisciplinary doctrine on the subject was analyzed. The study grouped Brazilian legislation and bills that affect the regulation of the subject, found the lack of legal resources to regulate the problem, noted possibilities for dialogue between legislative, social, technological and market spheres. It concluded that regulated partnerships are effective in everyday life and, for this, it is also necessary to have a participative posture and the involvement of different social actors.

The spread of disinformation on social media platforms has in the last few years gained much scholarly attention, in particular its ability to alter democratic processes. The focus of this thesis has however been on the discourse surrounding disinformation rather than disinformation itself, more precisely, the construction and perception of disinformation as a security threat. Disinformation is an issue which is rapidly evolving with the creation of new technologies and opportunities. The aim of this thesis has been to investigate if this has led to a shift in the perception of disinformation as a threat and therefore a change of policy for the EU. This was realised through the utilisation of Carol Bacchi's WPR approach toolkits, in combination with the foundational principles derived from securitization theory. The thesis shows that the EU’s perception of disinformation as a threat has evolved from mainly focus on the decline of public trust and democratic processes. To also include and recognise a more multifaced view of the issue with a larger focus on manipulation, technology driven threats and media literacy deficiency.

With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form of automated systems that can find checkworthy information, detect fallacious argumentation of online content, retrieve relevant evidence from authoritative sources and analyze the veracity of claims given the retrieved evidence. The robustness and applicability of these systems depend on the availability of annotated resources to train machine learning models in a supervised fashion, as well as machine learning models that capture patterns beyond domain-specific lexical clues or genre-specific stylistic insights. In this thesis, we investigate the role of models for argument structure and argument quality in improving tasks relevant to fact-checking and furthering our understanding of misinformation and disinformation. We contribute to argumentation mining, misinformation detection, and fact-checking by releasing multiple annotated datasets, developing unified models across datasets and task formulations, and analyzing the vulnerabilities of such models in adversarial settings. We start by studying the argument structure's role in two downstream tasks related to fact-checking. As it is essential to differentiate factual knowledge from opinionated text, we develop a model for detecting the type of news articles (factual or opinionated) using highly transferable argumentation-based features. We also show the potential of argumentation features to predict the checkworthiness of information in news articles and provide the first multi-layer annotated corpus for argumentation and fact-checking. We then study qualitative aspects of arguments through models for fallacy recognition. To understand the reasoning behind checkworthiness and the relation of argumentative fallacies to fake content, we develop an annotation scheme of fallacies in fact-checked content and investigate avenues for automating the detection of such fallacies considering single- and multi-dataset training. Using instruction-based prompting, we introduce a unified model for recognizing twenty-eight fallacies across five fallacy datasets. We also use this model to explain the checkworthiness of statements in two domains. Next, we show our models for end-to-end fact-checking of statements that include finding the relevant evidence document and sentence from a collection of documents and then predicting the veracity of the given statements using the retrieved evidence. We also analyze the robustness of end-to-end fact extraction and verification by generating adversarial statements and addressing areas for improvements for models under adversarial attacks. Finally, we show that evidence-based verification is essential for fine-grained claim verification by modeling the human-provided justifications with the gold veracity labels.

No description available.

In the wake of events like the COVID-19 pandemic, the storming of the Capitol, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s time to start labeling misinformation for what it is: a negative externality to society. The spillover effects from the proliferation of mis- and disinformation have the potential to negatively impact the institution of democracy, civic engagement, and downstream health outcomes. Put simply, to understand the misinformation problem is to understand its complexities, its pitfalls, and its motivations. Taken as a whole, this paper articulates the need for a divergence from conventional economic theory on efficiency to a pro-social, welfare-based approach to internalization efforts. In doing so, this analysis presents a full-scale characterization of misinformation as a negative externality, starting with the reorganization of traditional microeconomic theory, followed by a platform-by-platform evaluation of various internalization strategies and evidence from the literature on the impacts of misinformation, and concluding with a commentary on potential remediation approaches. / Thesis ( BA ) — Boston College, 2022 . / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences . / Discipline: Departmental Honors . / Discipline: Economics .

Thesis advisor: Thomas Wesner / In the wake of events like the COVID-19 pandemic, the storming of the Capitol, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s time to start labeling misinformation for what it is: a negative externality to society. The spillover effects from the proliferation of mis- and disinformation have the potential to negatively impact the institution of democracy, civic engagement, and downstream health outcomes. Put simply, to understand the misinformation problem is to understand its complexities, its pitfalls, and its motivations. Taken as a whole, this paper articulates the need for a divergence from conventional economic theory on efficiency to a pro-social, welfare-based approach to internalization efforts. In doing so, this analysis presents a full-scale characterization of misinformation as a negative externality, starting with the reorganization of traditional microeconomic theory, followed by a platform-by-platform evaluation of various internalization strategies and evidence from the literature on the impacts of misinformation, and concluding with a commentary on potential remediation approaches. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Economics.

Social media platforms have become immensely popular over the years, leading to significant changes in cyberspace and the emergence of numerous challenges. These challenges have various faces, such as disinformation, online hate, cyberbullying, discrimination, biases, and other facets of harm. From the perspective of an end-user, the modern-age online ecosystem can be harmful in various ways, e.g., by consistently coming across disinformation in the online spaces or being targeted by a hate attack because of a specific ethnic or racial background. As we move forward, it is crucial to understand the nature and impact of new-age harms to make the Internet a safer place for everyone. To this end, my first contribution is the study of inauthentic accounts, also known as troll accounts. Troll accounts on social media are often sponsored by state actors aiming to manipulate public opinion on sensitive political topics. The strategy they commonly use is to interact with one another and appear innocuous to a regular user while covertly being used to spread toxic content and/or disinformation. I first study the effect that troll accounts have on online discussions on Reddit and show that state-sponsored troll accounts on Reddit produce threads that attract more toxic comments than other posts on the same subreddit. Next, I build TROLLMAGNIFIER, a detection system for troll accounts based on the observation that these accounts often exhibit loose coordination and interact with each other to advance specific narratives. TROLLMAGNIFIER learns the typical behavior of known troll accounts and identifies more that behave similarly. I show that using TROLLMAGNIFIER, one can grow the initial knowledge of potential trolls provided by Reddit by over 300%. Building upon the understanding of troll accounts and online campaigns, I then study the broader aspects of online disinformation. In this work, I study 19 influence campaigns on Twitter originating from various countries and identify several strategies adopted across different state actors, e.g., using scheduling services to delegate their posting tasks, utilizing fake third-party versions of popular applications (e.g., “Twitter for Android”) to post messages, extensively retweeting to push certain agendas, and posting innocuous messages (e.g., motivational quotes) to potentially avoid detection. Overall, I identify several universal traits among campaigns to create a cross-campaign detection system that can detect upto 94% accounts from unseen campaigns. Lastly, I delve deeper into the importance of cybersafety and study coordinated attacks, such as cyber-aggression and hate attacks, which are becoming increasingly common on video sharing networks like YouTube. Polarized online communities choose targets on prominent online platforms (e.g., YouTube) and organize their attacks by sending hateful messages to their target. The proposed system, TUBERAIDER, addresses this issue by automating the detection and attribution of attacks to their source communities, aiding in moderation, and understanding the motivations behind such actions. The system collects YouTube video links from diverse sources, including 4chan’s /pol/ board, r/The_Donald subreddit, and 16 incel subreddits. The attribution is performed through a machine learning classifier based on TF-IDF scores of important keywords and achieves an accuracy above 75% in attributing a coordinated attack to a given video. In summary, my research focuses on understanding, detecting, and combating online harms using a data-driven approach. I develop tools to mitigate the malicious behavior with the goal of offering policymakers guidelines to ensure user safety on social media platforms.

Should a democracy defend itself against disinformation? This paper investigates how thedebate surrounding this issue is conducted in Taiwan during the buildup to the two mostrecent elections, in 2020 and 2024. This is done by a systematic text analysis that categorizesarticles in to two different frames based on the two sides of the ‘disinformation-dilemma’.The material analyzed is newspaper articles from the Taiwanese newspaper Taipei Times thatwere published in the year leading up to the elections and included statements fromTaiwanese politicians on the subject. The results show that disinformation, in 2020, wasframed as a necessary evil, and democracy should not be limited to protect it. In 2024,however, it was framed as a threat to democracy and that measures must be taken to defendit. This provides us with a good understanding of how the Taiwanese debate has looked, andalso changed, over time.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis investigates ways in which the Fast & Frugal Heuristics (F&FH) programme in the field of Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) theory can be brought to bear on the phenomenon of disinformation. The study applies existing theory to develop an argument around the capacity of the F&FH framework to respond in a normative, descriptive and prescriptive fashion specifically to implicature-type disinformation. This leads to conclusions about the usefulness of the programme for a specific field that is supposed to be within the ambit of the programme. The study attempts to answer the research question by examining the philosophical and developmental history of JDM and of disinformation as a theme of inquiry. With the necessary background as context, the phenomenon of disinformation is investigated, specifically in the case of advertisements. Specific focus is given to pictorial metaphor that may lead to disinformation. The study concludes that F&FH only succeeds to some extent in its descriptive capacity, whilst it fails to provide normative or prescriptive insights when faced with implicature-type disinformation in the following ways: firstly, proponents of the F&FH programme seem selfcontradictory about the value of F&FH as a decision making theory – on the one hand they are generally positive about the its descriptive, normative and prescriptive abilities, whilst fully admitting to fundamental problems in every aspect of the theory and its applications. Secondly, even though there is a general admission of the importance of social and cultural elements in decision making, F&FH still remains intrinsically individualistic. As such it will fail to recognise deception and disinformation as those form part of a language act that is specifically designed around hidden motives and specialised persuasion techniques. Thirdly, F&FH will not be able to break free from the underlying issues it faces without breaking free from its philosophical underpinnings. F&FH still remains primarily empiricist through its behaviourist/positivist assumptions and application and as such fails to recognise the validity of concepts such as meaning, belief and attitude. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die tesis ondersoek die wyses waarop die Fast & Frugal Heuristics (F&FH) program in die veld van besluitnemingsteorie van toepassing gemaak kan word op die verskynsel van disinformasie. Die studie gebruik bestaande teorie in terme van normatiewe, voorskrywende en beskrywende toepassings om argument te ontwikkel rondom die kapasiteit van die F&FH raamwerk om te reageer op spesifiek implikatuur-tipe disinformasie. Dit lei tot gevolgtrekkings oor die bruikbaarheid van die program vir ‘n spesifieke veld wat veronderstel is om binne die bestek van die program te val. Die studie poog om die navorsingsvraag te antwoord deur die filosofiese en ontwikkelingsgeskiedenis van besluitnemingsteorie asook disinformasie te ondersoek. Met die nodige agtergrond as konteks word die verskynsel van disinformasie deur implikasie ondersoek, spesifiek in die geval van die advertensies. Daar word spesifiek gefokus op advertensies waar metafore wat ontwikkel word deur visuele beelde waardeur disinformasie geïmpliseer kan word. Die studie maak die gevolgtrekking dat F&FH slegs tot ’n mate sukses behaal as beskrywende teorie terwyl dit nie suksesvol toegepas kan word as normatiewe en voorskrywende teorie nie. Die volgende probleme word uitgelig: eerstens, voorstaanders van die F&FH program hou teenstrydige perspektiewe voor – aan die een kant is hulle oor die algemeen positief oor die teorie se beskrywende, normatiewe en voorskrywende kapasiteite terwyl hulle openlik getuig van die grondliggende probleme in bykans elke faset van die teorie en sy toepassings. Tweedens, ten spyte daarvan dat daar erkenning gegee word aan die sosiale en kulturele aspekte van besluitneming bly F&FH primêr individualisties. As sulks sal dit faal om valshede en disinformasie te herken aangesien beide elemente is van ’n taalaksie wat spesifiek ontwerp is rondom versteekte motiewe en gespesialiseerde oorredingstegnieke. Derdens, F&FH kan nie afstand doen van die onderliggende probleme sonder om weg te breek van die onderliggende filosofiese grondslag nie. F&FH bly hoofsaaklik empiristies deur die behavioristiese/positiwistiese eienskappe in die onderliggende aannames en toepassings – as sulks gee dit nie erkenning aan die geldigheid van konsepte soos betekenis, oortuiging en houding nie.