Managing Misinformation on Social Media: Targeted Newsfeed Interventions and Freedom of Thought

Whether it is being told a particular politician consumes children, or drinking cow urine will cure your disease, or that Jimi Hendrix is alive and well living the good life in Drumnadrochit, misinformation affects societies in myriad ways. Its spread online via social media platforms raises questions concerning how it can be addressed. This article engages with a related problem: Can the use of targeted behavioral interventions on social media newsfeeds to reduce the spread of misinformation be reconciled with the human right to freedom of thought

PoxVerifi: An Information Verification System to Combat Monkeypox Misinformation

Following recent outbreaks, monkeypox-related misinformation continues to rapidly spread online. This negatively impacts response strategies and disproportionately harms LGBTQ+ communities in the short-term, and ultimately undermines the overall effectiveness of public health responses. In an attempt to combat monkeypox-related misinformation, we present PoxVerifi, an open-source, extensible tool that provides a comprehensive approach to assessing the accuracy of monkeypox related claims. Leveraging information from existing fact checking sources and published World Health Organization (WHO) information, we created an open-sourced corpus of 225 rated monkeypox claims. Additionally, we trained an open-sourced BERT-based machine learning model for specifically classifying monkeypox information, which achieved 96% cross-validation accuracy. PoxVerifi is a Google Chrome browser extension designed to empower users to navigate through monkeypox-related misinformation. Specifically, PoxVerifi provides users with a comprehensive toolkit to assess the veracity of headlines on any webpage across the Internet without having to visit an external site. Users can view an automated accuracy review from our trained machine learning model, a user-generated accuracy review based on community-member votes, and have the ability to see similar, vetted, claims. Besides PoxVerifi's comprehensive approach to claim-testing, our platform provides an efficient and accessible method to crowdsource accuracy ratings on monkeypox related-claims, which can be aggregated to create new labeled misinformation datasets.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Nudging Compliance: Empowering Public Employees to Uphold Regulations and Safeguard Against Corruption

[EN]The aim of this doctoral thesis is to critically assess, from a theoretical standpoint, the employment of Nudge and Compliance techniques in the public sector as a conduit for enhancing adherence to regulations by public servants, and thereby averting corrupt practices within the public administration environment. With this, the intention is to contribute to the development of policies and practices that enhance integrity and efficiency in public management

Towards User Empowerment: Bridging the Gap in Health Misinformation Protection on Social Networks

Health misinformation in social networks requires immediate attention due to its severe consequences, as exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic response on social media. However, the existing solutions designed to combat misinformation generally overlook the unique characteristics of health misinformation domain. Through a review of relevant literature and a critical analysis of current anti-misinformation solutions, we have identified significant user-side issues that undermine the effectiveness of existing approaches in addressing health misinformation. To tackle these issues, we put forth several strategies to empower users in combating health misinformation. Our research contributes to understanding the challenges associated with health misinformation correction on social networks

Improving Contact Tracing in Minority Communities by Combating Misinformation and Distrust

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge the global population as infection rates climb, and officials struggle to balance the need to slow the spread of COVID-19 but also open economies safely. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minority communities has raised questions about the unique experiences of these communities in terms of not only becoming infected with COVID-19, but also mitigating its spread. Although contact tracing has been identified as an invaluable tool for managing community spread and supporting economic reopening, this is contingent, in part, upon compliance with contact tracer requests. In this study, we investigated how misinformation and distrust might influence intentions to comply with contact tracer requests among a sample of self-identified minority New Yorkers. Results showed that intentions to comply with contact tracing requests was directly related to knowledge about contact tracing, trust in contact tracers, trust in healthcare professionals, and self-identified political liberalism. Results also showed that increased intentions to comply with contact tracers was indirectly influenced by trust in healthcare professionals, trust in government healthcare officials, and trust in news media via increased trust in contact tracers, and health literacy and political liberalism through increased knowledge of contact tracing. These findings inform four policy recommendations for improving contact tracing compliance among minority individuals by combating misinformation and distrust

Why do People Share Misinformation during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The World Health Organization have emphasised that misinformation - spreading rapidly through social media - poses a serious threat to the COVID-19 response. Drawing from theories of health perception and cognitive load, we develop and test a research model hypothesizing why people share unverified COVID-19 information through social media. Our findings suggest a person's trust in online information and perceived information overload are strong predictors of unverified information sharing. Furthermore, these factors, along with a person's perceived COVID-19 severity and vulnerability influence cyberchondria. Females were significantly more likely to suffer from cyberchondria, however, males were more likely to share news without fact checking their source. Our findings suggest that to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and cyberchondria, measures should be taken to enhance a healthy skepticism of health news while simultaneously guarding against information overload

AN ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 MISINFORMATION ON THE TELEGRAM SOCIAL NETWORK

The proliferation of misinformation groups and users on social networks has illustrated the need for targeted misinformation detection, analysis, and countering techniques. For example, in 2018, Twitter disclosed research that identified more than 50,000 malicious accounts linked to foreign-backed agencies that used the social network to spread propaganda and influence voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Twitter also began removing and labeling content as misinformation during the 2020 U.S. election, which led to an influx of users to social networks, such as Telegram. Telegram’s dedication to free speech and privacy is an attractive platform for misinformation groups and thus provides a unique opportunity to observe and measure how unabated ideas and sentiments evolve and spread. In this thesis, we create a dataset by crawling channels and groups in Telegram that are centered around COVID-19 and vaccine conversations. For analysis, we first analyze the topics and sentiments of the data using machine learning models. Next, we analyze the time series relationship between sentiment and topic trends. Then, we look for topic relationships by clustering performed on topic-based graph networks. Lastly, we cluster channels using document vectors to identify super-groups of related conversations. We conclude that Telegram communities risk producing echo chamber effects and are potential targets for external actors to embed and grow misinformation without hindrance.Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited