Conferring resistance to digital disinformation: the innoculating influence of procedural news knowledge

Despite the pervasiveness of digital disinformation in society, little is known about the individual characteristics that make some users more susceptible to erroneous information uptake than others, effectively dividing the media audience into prone and resistant groups. This study identifies and tests procedural news knowledge as a consequential civic resource with the capacity to inoculate audiences from disinformation and close this “resistance gap.” Engaging the persuasion knowledge model, the study utilizes data from two national surveys to demonstrate that possessing working knowledge of how the news media operate aids in the identification and effects of fabricated news and native advertising.Accepted manuscrip

The quality of political information

The article conceptualizes the quality of political information and shows how the concept can be used for empirical research. I distinguish three aspects of quality (intelligibility, relevance, validity) and use them to judge the constituent foundations of political information, that is component claims (statements of alleged facts) and connection claims (argumentative statements created by causally linking two component claims). The resulting conceptual map thus entails six manifestations of information quality (component claimintelligibility, connection claim intelligibility, component claimrelevance, connection claim relevance, component claim validity, and connection claim validity). I explain how the conceptual map can be used to make sense of the eclectic variety of existing research, and how it can advance new empirical research, as a guide for determining variation in information quality, as a conceptual template for the analysis of different types of political messages and their common quality deficiencies, and as a generator of new research questions and theoretical expectations

Exploring Misinformation Campaigns And How To Defend Against Them

Misinformation campaigns can have very real and lasting effects. Misinformation has been known to impact elections, create vaccine hesitancy, and increase polarization within societies. This paper reviewed existing literature regarding misinformation research, collected information from research participants to discern factors which may contribute to an increased susceptibility to misinformation, and examined Rule Based Training and a training program which utilized both rules and mindfulness to ascertain if these training programs might be effective in reducing participant susceptibility to misinformation

The Impact of Psycholinguistic Patterns in Discriminating between Fake News Spreaders and Fact Checkers

[EN] Fake news is a threat to society. A huge amount of fake news is posted every day on social networks which is read, believed and sometimes shared by a number of users. On the other hand, with the aim to raise awareness, some users share posts that debunk fake news by using information from fact-checking websites. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the role of various psycholinguistic characteristics in differentiating between users that tend to share fake news and users that tend to debunk them. Psycholinguistic characteristics represent the different linguistic information that can be used to profile users and can be extracted or inferred from users¿ posts. We present the CheckerOrSpreader model that uses a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to differentiate between spreaders and checkers of fake news. The experimental results showed that CheckerOrSpreader is effective in classifying a user as a potential spreader or checker. Our analysis showed that checkers tend to use more positive language and a higher number of terms that show causality compared to spreaders who tend to use a higher amount of informal language, including slang and swear words.The works of Anastasia Giachanou and Daniel Oberski were funded by the Dutch Research Council (grant VI.Vidi.195.152). The work of Paolo Rosso was in the framework of the XAI-DisInfodemics project on eXplainable AI for disinformation and conspiracy detection during infodemics (PLEC2021-007681), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as IBERIFIER, the Iberian Digital Media Research and Fact-Checking Hub funded by the European Digital Media Observatory (2020-EU-IA0252).Giachanou, A.; Ghanem, BHH.; Rissola, EA.; Rosso, P.; Crestani, F.; Oberski, D. (2022). The Impact of Psycholinguistic Patterns in Discriminating between Fake News Spreaders and Fact Checkers. Data & Knowledge Engineering. 138:1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2021.10196011513

Trust, personality, and belief as determinants of the organic reach of political disinformation on social media

False political information spreads far and fast across social media, with negative consequences for society. Individual users play a key role in sharing such material, extending its range through the phenomenon of organic reach. An online experiment tested the hypotheses that higher trust in the source of false information, and lower agreeableness of the person encountering it, would predict their likelihood of extending its reach. One hundred and seventy-two participants saw real examples of disinformation stories that had been posted to social media and rated their likelihood of sharing and interacting with it in other ways. Neither trust in the source nor agreeableness influenced organic reach. However, people lower in conscientiousness rated themselves as more likely to extend its reach, as did people who believed the stories more likely to be true

Understanding Citizens’ Vulnerabilities (II): From Disinformation to Hostile Narratives

This report analyses how disinformation campaigns have evolved into more complex hostile narratives, taking Italy, France, and Spain as case studies to prove what has been observed and determined from analytical and numerical research. During the last years, malicious actors have been able to rely on much more sophisticated and organized disinformation campaigns in an attempt to manipulate citizens’ perceptions. Technological advances have provided producers and sharer of distorted information with new powerful means to reach an ever-wider audience. One of the reasons this system of propaganda and disinformation is so effective and successful is that it deceives ordinary citizens into sharing false stories within their own circle of friends and acquaintances, while platforms’ algorithms have the capacity to pick these messages up very quickly and amplify it on an unprecedented scale. Most of this content is not designed to channel people into a particular direction, but to create confusion and erode the trust in our media, institutions and eventually, democracy itself. Hostile narratives target feelings and emotions and touch upon specific social vulnerabilities. They are made of true and false information, where the narration of facts counts more than the facts themselves. They rely on negatively charged emotions, like fear or anger, in order to lower the means of rational self-defence and trigger self-survival instincts, creating a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. It should be said that public figures and the media in recent years have played a key role in disseminating false and unsupported information. There has been a dramatic rise in the number and type of news programs available, including a troubling number of partisan programs that often feature false or exaggerated information. In the last decades, foreign interference has been pushed by the belief that by breaking the Euro-Atlantic link, the West would end as a strategic entity. Russian military interventions in Georgia in 2008 and in Crimea in 2014, China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia and the mosaic of sovereigntist and populist parties that have revamped anti-Americanism and anti-globalism, combined with sudden asymmetric cyberwarfare, can describe the most formidable and dangerous challenge that democracies are facing since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This report will highlight in chapter 2 how hostile narratives target citizens’ vulnerabilities exploiting fear mongering using algorithmic content curation. In Chapter 3, the case studies will describe how different disinformation campaigns have been used in Italy, France and Spain, while chapter 4 will provide examples on how hostile disinformation narratives were employed in France and Italy.JRC.E.7-Knowledge for Security and Migratio

Online Manipulation: Hidden Influences in a Digital World

Privacy and surveillance scholars increasingly worry that data collectors can use the information they gather about our behaviors, preferences, interests, incomes, and so on to manipulate us. Yet what it means, exactly, to manipulate someone, and how we might systematically distinguish cases of manipulation from other forms of influence—such as persuasion and coercion—has not been thoroughly enough explored in light of the unprecedented capacities that information technologies and digital media enable. In this paper, we develop a definition of manipulation that addresses these enhanced capacities, investigate how information technologies facilitate manipulative practices, and describe the harms—to individuals and to social institutions—that flow from such practices. We use the term “online manipulation” to highlight the particular class of manipulative practices enabled by a broad range of information technologies. We argue that at its core, manipulation is hidden influence—the covert subversion of another person’s decision-making power. We argue that information technology, for a number of reasons, makes engaging in manipulative practices significantly easier, and it makes the effects of such practices potentially more deeply debilitating. And we argue that by subverting another person’s decision-making power, manipulation undermines his or her autonomy. Given that respect for individual autonomy is a bedrock principle of liberal democracy, the threat of online manipulation is a cause for grave concern

Esoteric Psychology

The author proposes a field as a new sub-branch of psychology, called Esoteric Psychology. This would be a sub-branch of Cognitive Psychology. The author claims that even the newest forms of psychology are not able to investigate special or higher states of consciousness, due to being too externally oriented; that is, standing outside of the subjective space of the subject. The author cites a wealth of information and guidance which has come down to us from ancient times, and which is practiced in the forms of shamanism, certain religions, martial arts and yoga; he claims that these can be organized and used to deliberately attain the desired states and, in these states, the scholar-practitioner will be able to study, understand and assist in new therapies and larger ideas than otherwise. The aspiration is that the subconscious and unconscious minds could be better understood and accessed, and also legendary features of the mind could be apprehended, such as miracles and the supernatural. The author claims that, in so doing, ‘reality’ could be transformed and the general consciousness of society could be uplifted

A call to action for librarians: Countering conspiracy theories in the age of QAnon

Librarians empower learners to become discerning citizens through a set of diverse skills and literacies. To cultivate critical thinkers, librarians continue to build innovative practices, even as technology rapidly evolves. However, the pervasiveness of misinformation and disinformation, most recently seen in the conspiratorial worldviews of QAnon, challenges librarians to center critical thinking in their information literacy praxis. In this article, we provide a concise overview of QAnon and the problems that contemporary internet conspiracy theories like it pose. We offer an epistemological shift for information literacy, from heuristics to mindsets and behaviors, drawing on disciplines external to librarianship. Finally, we consider the role that emotions play in the promotion and spread of conspiracism. Equipping librarians with a better understanding of conspiracy thinking and the tools to counter it will in turn empower the next generation of critical thinkers