Is this the Era of Misinformation yet

Abstract

Social media is an amazing platform for enhancing public exposure. Anyone, even social bots, can reach out to a vast community and expose one's opinion. But what happens when fake news is (un)intentionally spread within a social media? This paper reviews techniques that can be used to fabricate fake news and depicts a scenario where social bots evolve in a fully semantic Web to infest social media with automatically generated deceptive information. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → World Wide Web; Social networks; Internet communications tools; • Human-centered computing → Social content sharing;

“Life never matters in the DEMOCRATS MIND”: Examining strategies of retweeted social bots during a mass shooting event

“…Their findings support those from other work demonstrating the difficulty that Twitter users experience in identifying tweets from social bots, which may be due to the informal and short nature of Twitter messages (Freitas, Benevenuto, Ghosh, & Veloso, 2015). Therefore, there exists a potential for bots to leverage interactions with human users to disseminate misinformation and wage disinformation campaigns via social contagion (Wang, Angarita, & Renna, 2018). Studies of Twitter social bot involvement in other topics, including Brexit (UK) and political conversations in Venezuela (Forelle, Howard, Monroy-Hernandez, & Savage, 2015) found that social bots played a less prominent role based on content generated and retweeted.…”

Bots and Misinformation Spread on Social Media: Implications for COVID-19

“…Similarly, Vosoughi et al [56] found that "fake news" articles spread faster on Twitter than true news articles because humans, not bots, were more likely to retweet fake articles. Given human susceptibility to both automated accounts and "fake news," some have warned that intelligent social bots could be leveraged for mass deception or even "political overthrow" [57].…”

Misinformation sharing and social media fatigue during COVID-19: An affordance and cognitive load perspective

“…Almost half (42%) of people sharing news reported having, at least at some point, shared misinformation ( Chadwick and Vaccari, 2019 ). There have been reports of bots being used to increase the visibility of fake news ( Howard et al., 2017 ; Wang et al., 2018 ), as well as attempts to algorithmically detect fake news ( Del Vicario et al., 2016 ). While bot networks spreading this news can be detected and stopped, algorithms cannot, in many cases, distinguish fake news from real news ( Del Vicario et al., 2016 ).…”