Are Mutated Misinformation More Contagious? A Case Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

Yan, Muheng; Lin, Yu‐Ru; Chung, Wen-Ting

doi:10.1145/3501247.3531562

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The use of social media tends to facilitate such social psychological antecedents and, subsequently, protest participation. Some argue that social media also gives rise to "slacktivism", a disconnect between awareness, support, and social media participation (Cabrera et al 2017;Yan, Lin, and Chung 2022), while others suggest social media can lead to offline collective action such as protests (Wilkins et al 2019). Our research aims to bridge the gap in understanding the reciprocal influence between online activism and offline collective action, an aspect that remains insufficiently explored in current literature.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Posts to Pavement, or Vice Versa? The Dynamic Interplay between Online Activism and Offline Confrontations

Yan,

Chiang,

Lin

2024

ICWSM

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This study examines how the relationship between social media discourse and offline confrontations in social movements, focusing on the "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) protests following George Floyd's death in 2020. While social media's role in facilitating social movements is well-documented, its relationship with offline confrontations remains understudied. To bridge this gap, we curated a dataset comprising 108,443 Facebook posts and 1,406 offline BLM protest events. Our analysis categorized online media framing into "consonance" (alignment) and "dissonance" (misalignment) with the perspectives of different involved parties. Our findings indicate a reciprocal relationship between online activism support and offline confrontational occurrences. Online support for the BLM, in particular, was associated with less property damage and fewer confrontational protests in the days that followed. Conversely, offline confrontations amplified online support for the protesters. By illuminating this dynamic, we highlight the multifaceted influence of social media on social movements. Not only does it serve as a platform for information dissemination and mobilization but also plays a pivotal role in shaping public discourse about offline confrontations.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Posts to Pavement, or Vice Versa? The Dynamic Interplay between Online Activism and Offline Confrontations

Yan,

Chiang,

Lin

2024

ICWSM

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“…While previous work has highlighted the importance of information mutation to misinformation propagation dynamics [44,45], such mutations are difficult to model, posing challenges to incorporating them into ABMs. In this work, we explore how LLMs may be leveraged to reduce this capability gap.…”

Section: Mutation Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital cloning of online social networks for language-sensitive agent-based modeling of misinformation spread

Puri,

Hassler,

Katragadda

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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We develop a simulation framework for studying misinformation spread within online social networks that blends agent-based modeling and natural language processing techniques. While many other agent-based simulations exist in this space, questions over their fidelity and generalization to existing networks in part hinder their ability to drive policy-relevant decision making. To partially address these concerns, we create a ’digital clone’ of a known misinformation sharing network by downloading social media histories for over ten thousand of its users. We parse these histories to both extract the structure of the network and model the nuanced ways in which information is shared and spread among its members. Unlike many other agent-based methods in this space, information sharing between users in our framework is sensitive to topic of discussion, user preferences, and online community dynamics. To evaluate the fidelity of our method, we seed our cloned network with a set of posts recorded in the base network and compare propagation dynamics between the two, observing reasonable agreement across the twin networks over a variety of metrics. Lastly, we explore how the cloned network may serve as a flexible, low-cost testbed for misinformation countermeasure evaluation and red teaming analysis. We hope the tools explored here augment existing efforts in the space and unlock new opportunities for misinformation countermeasure evaluation, a field that may become increasingly important to consider with the anticipated rise of misinformation campaigns fueled by generative artificial intelligence.

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“…We match propaganda quotes with literal exact matches and matches without punctuation and stopwords. These methods could be expanded to include other forms of near matches, such as topic modeling, segmentation [35], n-gram overlap [53], fuzzy search [7], paraphrasing [60], or rhetorical function matching [36]. These more sophisticated matching approaches may yield quotes that are similar in semantics or rhetoric, but do not have exact word overlap.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online to Offline Crossover of White Supremacist Propaganda

Diab

Jagdagdorj

et al. 2023

Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023

Self Cite

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White supremacist extremist groups are a significant domestic terror threat in many Western nations. These groups harness the Internet to spread their ideology via online platforms: blogs, chat rooms, forums, and social media, which can inspire violence offline. In this work, we study the persistence and reach of white supremacist propaganda in both online and offline environments. We also study patterns in narratives that crossover from online to offline environments, or vice versa. From a geospatial analysis, we find that offline propaganda is geographically widespread in the United States, with a slight tendency toward Northeastern states. Propaganda that spreads the farthest and lasts the longest has a patriotic framing and is short, memorable, and repeatable. Through text comparison methods, we illustrate that online propaganda typically leads the appearance of the same propaganda in offline flyers, banners, and graffiti. We hope that this study sheds light on the characteristics of persistent white supremacist narratives both online and offline. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; • Social and professional topics → User characteristics; • Information systems → Social networking sites.

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Are Mutated Misinformation More Contagious? A Case Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

Cited by 9 publications

References 21 publications

From Posts to Pavement, or Vice Versa? The Dynamic Interplay between Online Activism and Offline Confrontations

From Posts to Pavement, or Vice Versa? The Dynamic Interplay between Online Activism and Offline Confrontations

Digital cloning of online social networks for language-sensitive agent-based modeling of misinformation spread

Online to Offline Crossover of White Supremacist Propaganda

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