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Research papers on Misinformation on social media

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  1. Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review

    Esma Aı̈meur, Sabrine Amri, Gilles Brassard A · 2023 · Social Network Analysis and Mining · 770 citations

    Online social networks (OSNs) are rapidly growing and have become a huge source of all kinds of global and local news for millions of users. However, OSNs are a double-edged sword. Although the great advantages they offer such as unlimited easy communication and instant news and information, they can also have many disadvantages and issues. One of their major challenging issues is the spread of fake news. Fake news identification is still a complex unresolved issue. Furthermore, fake news detection on OSNs presents unique characteristics and challenges that make finding a solution anything but trivial. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are still incapable of overcomi

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  2. Trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media

    Hunt Allcott, Matthew Aaron Gentzkow, Chuan Yu · 2019 · Research & Politics · 680 citations

    In recent years, there has been widespread concern that misinformation on social media is damaging societies and democratic institutions. In response, social media platforms have announced actions to limit the spread of false content. We measure trends in the diffusion of content from 569 fake news websites and 9540 fake news stories on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. User interactions with false content rose steadily on both Facebook and Twitter through the end of 2016. Since then, however, interactions with false content have fallen sharply on Facebook while continuing to rise on Twitter, with the ratio of Facebook engagements to Twitter shares decreasing by 60%. I

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  4. The spread of fake news by social bots

    Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, et al. · 2017 · arXiv (Cornell University) · 249 citations

    The massive spread of fake news has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts to study the complex causes for the viral diffusion of digital misinformation and to develop solutions, while search and social media platforms are beginning to deploy countermeasures. However, to date, these efforts have been mainly informed by anecdotal evidence rather than systematic data. Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand claims on Twitter during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election. We find evidence that social bot

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  5. Fake News: Spread of Misinformation about Urological Conditions on Social Media

    Stacy Loeb, Jacob I. Taylor, James F. Borin, et al. · 2019 · European Urology Focus · 70 citations

    Although there is a large amount of user-generated content about urological health issues on social media, much of this content has not been vetted for information accuracy. In this article, we review the literature on the quality and balance of information on urological health conditions on social networks. Across a wide range of benign and malignant urological conditions, studies show a substantial amount of commercial, biased and/or inaccurate information present on popular social networking sites. The healthcare community should take proactive steps to improve the quality of medical information on social networks. PATIENT SUMMARY: In this review, we examined the spread of misinformation

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  6. SA-Bi-LSTM: Self Attention With Bi-Directional LSTM-Based Intelligent Model for Accurate Fake News Detection to Ensured Information Integrity on Social Media Platforms

    Wang Jian, Jian-Ping Li, M. Akbar, et al. · 2024 · IEEE Access · 36 citations

    Detecting fake news is increasingly crucial in the digital age as social platforms and online news outlets amplify the spread of misinformation. This study proposes a novel approach for fake news detection using a Bi-LSTM neural network with an attention mechanism. The Bi-LSTM model’s ability to discern long-range relationships and sequential patterns in text data is augmented by the attention mechanism, focusing on key segments within the text to enhance discriminative power. The dataset for training comprises a diverse collection of news articles, meticulously annotated by human fact-checkers to include both real and fake news samples. Pre-processing steps, including tokenization, are unde

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  7. FAKE NEWS AND MISINFORMATION

    Matthew N. O. Sadiku, Tochukwu P Eze, Sarhan M. Musa · 2018 · International Journal of Advances in Scientific Research and Engineering · 35 citations

    Fake news is a type of propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation. This false information is mainly spread through journals, magazines, mainstream media or social media. With the increasing popularity of social media and mobile phone, more and more people consume news from social media instead of traditional news media. Thus social media has proved to be a powerful source for fake news propagation. This paper provides a brief introduction to fake news.

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  8. Concerns over the Spread of Misinformation and Fake News on Social Media—Challenges Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

    Janni Leung, Mariyana Schoultz, Vivian Chiu, et al. · 2021 · Proceedings of The 3rd International Electronic Conference on Environmental Research and Public Health —Public Health Issues in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic · 23 citations

    The unfolding pandemic of COVID-19, also known as coronavirus, has caused challenges across the globe. Shelter-in-place, lockdown, and social distancing policies increased the use of social media for societies to stay connected. This study investigated the psychological issues societies experienced using social media in the community during this critical period. Cross-sectional online surveys were used to collect qualitative data from 1991 respondents living in the UK, USA, and Australia during April–May 2020 when the shelter-in-place or stay-at-home policies were in place. The study found that the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories caused psychosocial challenges and disconnect

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  10. Can Correction Messages Reduce the Spread of Fake News on Social Media? The Impact of Information Updates on the Effectiveness of Corrections

    Kelvin K. King, Diego Escobari · 2025 · Journal of Management Information Systems · 7 citations

    ABSTRACT Although government agencies and fact-checking organizations issue correction messages to mitigate misinformation dissemination on social media, their efforts have been largely ineffective. Drawing on Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) and information extracted from over 84 million tweets, we examine the impact of correction messages and explore how different information updates affect their effectiveness. Our empirical approach differentiates between subpopulations of correction messages. The results support the existence of two distinct types: correction messages that significantly mitigate the spread of fake news—a 1 percent increase in “effective” messages decreases the sprea

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  11. Social media, misinformation and fake news in the pandemic: the dominant gaps and future research avenues

    Noel Nutsugah, Kobby Mensah, Raphael Odoom, et al. · 2024 · Online Inf. Rev. · 5 citations

    PurposeSocial networking sites have become breeding grounds for the spread of fake news and misinformation. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the spread of fake news intensified, causing complications for health communicators by drowning authentic information from verifiable official sources. Looking at the impact of this growing phenomenon on people’s attitudes and behaviour during the pandemic, research in the area must be populated to help governments, supranational organisations, non-governmental organisations as well as civil society organisations to formulate policies to curb the menace. This study was therefore undertaken to unravel current gaps and future research avenues to em

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  12. Analyzing the Interplay between Diversity of News Recommendations and Misinformation Spread in Social Media

    R. Pathak, F. Spezzano · 2024 · Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization · 5 citations

    Recommender systems play a crucial role in social media platforms, especially in the context of news, by assisting users in discovering relevant news. However, these systems can inadvertently contribute to increased personalization, and the formation of filter bubbles and echo chambers, thereby aiding in the propagation of fake news or misinformation. This study specifically focuses on examining the tradeoffs between the diversity of news recommendations and the dissemination of misinformation on social media. We evaluated classical recommender algorithms on two Twitter (now X) datasets to assess the diversity of top-10 recommendation lists and simulated the propagation of recommended misinf

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  13. From Social Media to Global Misinformation: the Role of Citizen Journalism and Photojournalism in the Spread of False News Amid the Bangladesh Crisis -A Case Analysis

    Abhirup Bhadra · 2024 · International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research · 5 citations

    In this digital age, social media platforms—particularly Facebook and X, the old Twitter—have emerged as the main venues for citizen journalism and photojournalism, particularly in times of crisis like the upheaval in Bangladesh. Social media facilitates real-time recordkeeping, but it also makes it simple to spread misinformation and fake news. During the Bangladesh crisis, the research used citizen-generated digital photographs and videos to dissect how false narratives were spread, echo chambers developed, and disinformation spread throughout the globe with a communal angle leading to the creating of dynamo effect of misinformation and polarization. This highlights the amplification of fa

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  14. Fake News? Quantifying the Prevalence of Misinformation Related to Scoliosis on the TikTok Social Media Platform

    Banahene Glover, Anne-Marie Datcu, Macy Meyer, et al. · 2025 · Journal of the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America · 4 citations

    Background The lack of presence by spine deformity surgeons on TikTok, in addition to the platform’s unregulated nature, raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation regarding pediatric orthopaedic conditions. The purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of scoliosis misinformation on TikTok with a specific focus on what types of scoliosis content contain the most misinformation and which content creators produce the most videos containing this misinformation. Methods A comprehensive search was conducted on TikTok using the following hashtags: #scoliosis, #scoliosischiropractor, #scoliosisbrace, #scoliosissurgery. A total of 239 videos were reviewed over a 7-day peri

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  15. A Transformer-Based Approach for Fake News and Spam Detection in Social Media Using RoBERTa

    Ankit Pal, S. Mondal, C. A. Kumar, et al. · 2025 · 2025 International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems for Collaborative Intelligence (ICMSCI) · 4 citations

    The spread of misinformation and spam on social media has become a critical challenge, undermining information integrity and online security. Addressing this pressing issue, this study introduces an advanced solution utilizing RoBERTa, a transformer-based deep learning model, for the effective detection of fake news and spam. By employing sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, the proposed method demonstrates exceptional accuracy in classifying unreliable content, making it a valuable tool in today's digital communication landscape. The approach is designed to provide real-time detection capabilities, ensuring swift identification and mitigation of misinformation and spa

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  16. SmoothDectector: A Smoothed Dirichlet Multimodal Approach for Combating Fake News on Social Media

    Akinlolu Oluwabusayo Ojo, Fatma Najar, Nuha Zamzami, et al. · 2025 · IEEE Access · 4 citations

    The rapid dissemination of fake news in the digital era has become a pressing concern. The ease of generating and manipulating fake content, including images, text, audio, and videos, has significantly fueled the spread of misinformation on social media platforms. These platforms often lack rigorous editorial scrutiny, exacerbating this problem. Although recent studies have explored multimodal fake news detection to learn shared representations of textual and visual information, they often learn discrete latent representations, merely concatenations of multimodal features. Simple concatenation or summation operations hinder the dynamic interaction of multimodal features. Furthermore, most mo

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  17. Tri-Algo guardian ensemble approach for fake news detection in social media

    Borra Vineetha, M. Nirmala · 2025 · Journal of Big Data · 4 citations

    The rapid spread of misinformation in the digital age highlights the need for effective fake news classification systems. This research evaluates classification methods using multiple datasets, which present distinct challenges and features. Advanced preprocessing techniques enhance data quality, while various word embedding methods capture linguistic and contextual features. To address class imbalance, oversampling and class weighting strategies are applied. An ensemble approach integrates multiple models to improve classification accuracy. Results indicate that advanced embeddings achieve superior performance, while traditional methods remain computationally efficient. Ensemble models cons

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  18. The Impact of Content Moderation Policy on the Spread of Fake News on Social Media in Indonesia

    Evy Febryani · 2025 · The Easta Journal Law and Human Rights · 3 citations

    This research investigates the impact of content moderation policies on the spread of hoax news on social media platforms in Indonesia, employing a normative legal analysis approach. The study examines the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks, such as the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE Law), and evaluates content moderation mechanisms employed by both the government and social media platforms. Findings indicate that while the ITE Law provides a legal basis for addressing misinformation, its vague provisions and potential for misuse have raised concerns regarding freedom of speech. Additionally, content moderation efforts by the government and social media platforms fa

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  19. FAKE NEWS, MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION ABOUT COVID-19 IN SOCIAL MEDIA DURING THE PANDEMIC AND POST-PANDEMIC TIME (CASE OF GEORGIA)

    Dali Osepashvili · 2023 · International Journal of Innovative Technologies in Social Science · 3 citations

    Spreading fake news and disinformation is one of the global challenges over the last years. It is a challenge for Georgia too. This acute problem was also current at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a number of misinformation appear in the social media as well as in the traditional media, regarding the origin and spread of the coronavirus, especially in Facebook which is the most popular social network in Georgia. A lot of fake news was spread and is still being spread in the post-pandemic period too. The Goal of this research paper is to explore the attitudes of Georgian Facebook users, specifically what kind of fake news and disinformation they met about Coronavirus in social m

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  20. The Geometry of Misinformation: Embedding Twitter Networks of Users Who Spread Fake News in Geometrical Opinion Spaces

    Pedro Ramaciotti Morales, Manon Berriche, Jean-Philippe Cointet · 2023 · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 3 citations

    To understand why internet users spread fake news online, many studies have focused on individual drivers, such as cognitive skills, media literacy, or demographics. Recent findings have also shown the role of complex socio-political dynamics, highlighting that political polarization and ideologies are closely linked to a propensity to participate in the dissemination of fake news. Most of the existing empirical studies have focused on the US example by exploiting the self-reported or solicited positioning of users on a dichotomous scale opposing liberals with conservatives. Yet, left-right polarization alone is insufficient to study socio-political dynamics when considering non binary and m

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  21. Breaking the Fake: A CNN-BiLSTM Approach for Fake News Detection on Social Media

    Rohit Viswakarma Pidishetti, Uma Chinta · 2025 · 2025 IEEE 15th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC) · 2 citations

    Misinformation, especially during global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, has posed significant challenges by spreading harmful and baseless claims at an unprecedented scale. Addressing this critical issue requires robust methods for distinguishing reliable information from fake news. This study presents a novel deep learning approach that leverages a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to detect misinformation with high accuracy. Using the COVID-19 Fake News dataset, comprising 8,560 tweets validated by fact-checking organizations, our proposed model achieves a remarkable 92% accuracy, surpassing traditional machine learning mo

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  22. Mapping fake news and misinformation in media: A two-decade bibliometric review of emerging trends

    Vijesh Vijayan, Temin Thomas, Princy D. Nellanat · 2025 · Insight - News Media · 2 citations

    The rapid proliferation of fake news and misinformation poses significant challenges to media trust, public decision-making, and societal cohesion in the digital age. This study employs a bibliometric analysis to systematically map the scholarly landscape surrounding fake news and misinformation across media platforms, focusing on social media’s pivotal role in shaping public perception and trust. Utilizing data from the Scopus database, the study analyzes 560 documents published between 2005 and 2025, uncovering trends in annual scientific production, leading sources, author contributions, and geographical distribution. Key bibliometric indicators, including keyword co-occurrence networks a

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  23. Curtailing the spread of fake news: Antecedents of citizens’ intention to correct misinformation on social media

    Beatriz Jordá, Manuel Goyanes, Lorena González‐Manzano · 2025 · Communications · 1 citations

    Abstract There are severe concerns over the widespread presence of fake news on social media and the vulnerability of citizens to its influence. Prior research on fake news has largely focused on the potential threat it poses to democracy, and has payed less attention to an opposing behavior that has emerged in parallel and mitigates its effects: citizens’ corrective actions. This study seeks to examine the sociopolitical antecedents that drive citizens to correct fake news on social media. Drawing on panel survey data from Spain (T 2 = 570), we explore the role that using social media for news, cross-cutting political discussion, and support for fake news censorship have on intention to cor

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  24. Fake News on Social Media and Its Effects on Public Opinion

    K. Soumya, Clement Perikala · 2025 · International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research · 1 citations

    The rise of social media as a primary news source has led to the widespread circulation of fake news, influencing public opinion and shaping societal narratives. Unlike traditional media, social media platforms lack strict editorial controls, allowing misinformation to spread rapidly. This paper examines the behind-the-scenes processes of spreading fake news in social media and its resulting implications to the attitude and action of the population due to Agenda-Setting and Framing Theories. Using quantitative research design, a survey was conducted among 103 participants to assess their exposure to fake news. The findings indicate that, WhatsApp and Instagram are the most commonly used serv

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