Tootfinder

Important thread on BlueSky from Elliot Higgins on misinformation.
#misinformation…

i love that posts on other platforms have deliberate misinformation so people point that out in the comments which boosts the post's engagement. very normal for a social network to behave this way

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is suing Fox News for defamation,
alleging that the news outlet intentionally manipulated a video
to give the appearance that the governor lied about a phone call with Donald Trump.
The governor’s demand for $787 million in punitive damages escalates his aggressive effort to challenge misinformation.

Newsom sues Fox News for defamation over story about call with Trump
California Gov. Gavin Newsom sues Fox News for defamation over story on call with President Trump.

"Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says"
#Climate #ClimateChange

"“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age"
https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26856
"This national qualitative study investigates academic librarians’ instruc…

FDA panel promotes misinformation about antidepressants during pregnancy, psychiatrists say (Aria Bendix/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/fda-panel-promotes-misinformation-antidepressants-pregnancy-psychiatri-rcna220047
http://www.memeorandum.com/250722/p6#a250722p6

"Weatherwatch: The Met Office fights back against climate misinformation"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Climate #ClimateChange

#JournalArticle: The End of Trust & Safety?: Examining the Future of Content Moderation and Upheavals in Professional Online Safety Effort
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713662

Twice in the past week, I’ve received an edit notification about a post I’d previously boosted where the edit corrected bad or incomplete information. In both cases, I boosted the correction.
I’ve long wished for social media misinformation policy to be “If you saw the bad info, you see the correction.” Mastodon comes closer to that than anything I’ve previously encountered.
There’s been a lot of theoretical hand-wringing about allowing edits on social media. In practice, this aspect at least seems like a huge success.

E-FreeM2: Efficient Training-Free Multi-Scale and Cross-Modal News Verification via MLLMs
Van-Hoang Phan, Long-Khanh Pham, Dang Vu, Anh-Duy Tran, Minh-Son Dao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20944

E-FreeM2: Efficient Training-Free Multi-Scale and Cross-Modal News Verification via MLLMs
The rapid spread of misinformation in mobile and wireless networks presents critical security challenges. This study introduces a training-free, retrieval-based multimodal fact verification system that leverages pretrained vision-language models and large language models for credibility assessment. By dynamically retrieving and cross-referencing trusted data sources, our approach mitigates vulnerabilities of traditional training-based models, such as adversarial attacks and data poisoning. Addi…

BotHash: Efficient and Training-Free Bot Detection Through Approximate Nearest Neighbor
Edoardo Di Paolo, Fabio De Gaspari, Angelo Spognardi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20503

BotHash: Efficient and Training-Free Bot Detection Through Approximate Nearest Neighbor
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cornerstone in modern society, serving as platforms for diverse content consumption by millions of users each day. However, the challenge of ensuring the accuracy of information shared on these platforms remains significant, especially with the widespread dissemination of disinformation. Social bots -- automated accounts designed to mimic human behavior, frequently spreading misinformation -- represent one of the critical problems of OSNs. The advent of Large…

Veracity: An Open-Source AI Fact-Checking System
Taylor Lynn Curtis, Maximilian Puelma Touzel, William Garneau, Manon Gruaz, Mike Pinder, Li Wei Wang, Sukanya Krishna, Luda Cohen, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Godbout, Reihaneh Rabbany, Kellin Pelrine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15794

Veracity: An Open-Source AI Fact-Checking System
The proliferation of misinformation poses a significant threat to society, exacerbated by the capabilities of generative AI. This demo paper introduces Veracity, an open-source AI system designed to empower individuals to combat misinformation through transparent and accessible fact-checking. Veracity leverages the synergy between Large Language Models (LLMs) and web retrieval agents to analyze user-submitted claims and provide grounded veracity assessments with intuitive explanations. Key feat…

"What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.”
From @… - Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/

Social Media Can Reduce Misinformation When Public Scrutiny is High
Gavin Wang, Haofei Qin, Xiao Tang, Lynn Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16355 https://

Social Media Can Reduce Misinformation When Public Scrutiny is High
Misinformation poses a growing global threat to institutional trust, democratic stability, and public decision-making. While prior research has often portrayed social media as a channel for spreading falsehoods, less is known about the conditions under which it may instead constrain misinformation by enhancing transparency and accountability. Here we show this dual potential in the context of local governments' GDP reporting in China, where data falsifications are widespread. Analyzing official…

How online misinformation works: a costly signalling perspective
Neri Marsili
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17158 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

How online misinformation works: a costly signalling perspective
This chapter explores how online communication, particularly on social media, reshapes the reputational incentives that motivate speakers to communicate truthfully. Drawing on costly signalling theory (CST), it examines how online contexts alter the social mechanisms that sustain honest communication. Key characteristics of online spaces are identified and discussed, namely (i) the presence of novel speech acts like reposting, (ii) the gamification of communication, (iii) information overload, …

A weaponized AI chatbot is flooding Canadian city councils with climate misinformation, and already having some 'success'.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/05/28/investigations/weaponized-ai-chatbot-…

A weaponized AI chatbot is flooding city councils with climate misinformation
Internal instructions accessed by Canada’s National Observer show that the chatbot produces tailored scripts, petitions, reports and even speeches for council chambers. The messaging is all framed to resonate with municipal officials’ duty to represent local interests. The chatbot drops the cost of misinformation to "close to zero."

Of course they would. Just when we need it most.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/business/trump-online-misinformation-grants.html?smid=url-share

FACT CHECK: Donald Trump presented South African president Cyril Ramaphosa with a collection of misinformation https://www.news24.com/southafrica/debunking/donald-trump-confronted-cyril-ramaphosa-with-a-collecti…

Towards Robust Fact-Checking: A Multi-Agent System with Advanced Evidence Retrieval
Tam Trinh, Manh Nguyen, Truong-Son Hy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17878 …

Towards Robust Fact-Checking: A Multi-Agent System with Advanced Evidence Retrieval
The rapid spread of misinformation in the digital era poses significant challenges to public discourse, necessitating robust and scalable fact-checking solutions. Traditional human-led fact-checking methods, while credible, struggle with the volume and velocity of online content, prompting the integration of automated systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing automated approaches often face limitations, such as handling complex claims, ensuring source credibility, and m…

An analysis of the top 100 trending TikTok videos under #mentalhealthtips finds 52 contain misinformation, including misused language and quick-fix methods (The Guardian)

Major Indian newsrooms aired misinformation during the conflict with Pakistan in May, saying Pakistani cities had been destroyed and airing unrelated visuals (Karishma Mehrotra/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/

How misinformation overtook Indian newsrooms amid conflict with Pakistan
Journalists from some of India’s largest news networks spoke to The Post about why falsehoods filled the airwaves during a crucial and dangerous moment.

artificial intelligence “enables the cost of misinformation to come close to zero.” 
And it is starts with flooding Canadian city council mailboxes with climate misinformation https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/05/2

"Resources to demystify fake news and misinformation"
https://doi.org/10.1080/15228959.2025.2519020
– closed access, unfortunately ... 🙄

You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control
Giovanni De Toni, Erasmo Purificato, Emilia G\'omez, Bruno Lepri, Andrea Passerini, Cristian Consonni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16829

You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control
Recommenders are significantly shaping online information consumption. While effective at personalizing content, these systems increasingly face criticism for propagating irrelevant, unwanted, and even harmful recommendations. Such content degrades user satisfaction and contributes to significant societal issues, including misinformation, radicalization, and erosion of user trust. Although platforms offer mechanisms to mitigate exposure to undesired content, these mechanisms are often insuffici…

FACT CHECK: Donald Trump presented South African president Cyril Ramaphosa with a collection of misinformation https://www.news24.com/southafrica/debunking/donald-trump-confronted-cyril-ramaphosa-with-a-collecti…

Duplicating Deceit: Inauthentic Behavior Among Indian Misinformation Duplicators on X/Twitter
Ashfaq Ali Shafin, Bogdan Carbunar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13636

Duplicating Deceit: Inauthentic Behavior Among Indian Misinformation Duplicators on X/Twitter
This paper investigates inauthentic duplication on social media, where multiple accounts share identical misinformation tweets. Leveraging a dataset of misinformation verified by AltNews, an Indian fact-checking organization, we analyze over 12 million posts from 5,493 accounts known to have duplicated such content. Contrary to common assumptions that bots are primarily responsible for spreading false information, fewer than 1\% of these accounts exhibit bot-like behavior. We present TweeXster,…

Den här artikeln berör annat än hälsofrågor men problemet är precis det samma. Använd inte AI för att få svar på mer kontroversiella frågor där du inte kan något sen tidigare. För allt för ofta så ger den dig påhittade svar samtidigt som det låter väldigt självsäkert.
AI swallows misinformation and spits it back at us: ‘It’s optimized to give useful information, but not for it to be correct’

AI swallows misinformation and spits it back at us: ‘It’s optimized to give useful information, but not for it to be correct’
ChatGPT and Grok absorb fake news and regurgitate it when asked. Due to their design, these models and their competitors are highly susceptible to disinformation

In the digital age, misinformation spreads rapidly, making it increasingly difficult to ensure the integrity of information. AI presents new opportunities to support fact-checking and news classification. Join Giovanna Monti and Lucian Precup as they share insights from their work developing an AI-driven platform integrating search capabilities, an intelligent assistant and a RAG system.
Learn more:

Culling Misinformation from Gen AI: Toward Ethical Curation and Refinement
Prerana Khatiwada, Grace Donaher, Jasymyn Navarro, Lokesh Bhatta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14242

Culling Misinformation from Gen AI: Toward Ethical Curation and Refinement
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a new field, recent developments, especially with the release of generative tools like ChatGPT, have brought it to the forefront of the minds of industry workers and academic folk alike. There is currently much talk about AI and its ability to reshape many everyday processes as we know them through automation. It also allows users to expand their ideas by suggesting things they may not have thought of on their own and provides easier access to informati…

[PODCAST] Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine?
https://pca.st/episode/a003e200-73bf-405f-9036-f96590459999
“Bradford Vivian is at Penn State. His latest book is Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in Am…

"AI Can Help Limit the Spread of Misinformation During Natural Disaster, Study Finds"
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence

AI Can Help Limit the Spread of Misinformation During Natural Disaster, Study Finds - Inside Climate News
Through so-called natural language processing, AI can identify misinformation, track its spread and monitor the digital information landscape in real time. But it has its limits.

`Socheton': A Culturally Appropriate AI Tool to Support Reproductive Well-being
Sharifa Sultana, Hafsah Mahzabin Chowdhury, Zinnat Sultana, Nervo Verdezoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12357

`Socheton': A Culturally Appropriate AI Tool to Support Reproductive Well-being
Reproductive well-being education in the Global South is often challenged as many communities perceive many of its contents as misinformation, misconceptions, and language-inappropriate. Our ten-month-long ethnographic study (n=41) investigated the impact of sociocultural landscape, cultural beliefs, and healthcare infrastructure on Bangladeshi people's access to quality reproductive healthcare and set four design goals: combating misinformation, including culturally appropriate language, profe…

Climate solutions have widespread support in America, but misinformation is holding us back. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Climate solutions are more popular than you might think
Fossil fuel PR campaigns have misled people into believing that climate solutions are more controversial than they actually are.

"Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans."
Gift link.

Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security
The drama offers a case study in how Elon Musk’s team sought to run a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts — and how longtime employees responded.

Frame-level Temporal Difference Learning for Partial Deepfake Speech Detection
Menglu Li, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Lian Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15101 https…

Frame-level Temporal Difference Learning for Partial Deepfake Speech Detection
Detecting partial deepfake speech is essential due to its potential for subtle misinformation. However, existing methods depend on costly frame-level annotations during training, limiting real-world scalability. Also, they focus on detecting transition artifacts between bonafide and deepfake segments. As deepfake generation techniques increasingly smooth these transitions, detection has become more challenging. To address this, our work introduces a new perspective by analyzing frame-level temp…

AI cannot fact check
#misinformation

An analysis of the top 100 trending TikTok videos under #mentalhealthtips finds 52 contain misinformation, including misused language and quick-fix methods (The Guardian)

Leveraging Pre-Trained Visual Models for AI-Generated Video Detection
Keerthi Veeramachaneni, Praveen Tirupattur, Amrit Singh Bedi, Mubarak Shah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13224

Leveraging Pre-Trained Visual Models for AI-Generated Video Detection
Recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI) have led to significant improvements in the quality of generated visual content. As AI-generated visual content becomes increasingly indistinguishable from real content, the challenge of detecting the generated content becomes critical in combating misinformation, ensuring privacy, and preventing security threats. Although there has been substantial progress in detecting AI-generated images, current methods for video detection are largely focused on deep…

Over the past few months, we have seen the Trump administration engage not only in medical misinformation, but in active censorship of scientific discourse.
Since he took the helm at HHS, Kennedy’s unscientific views on vaccines and some other medical matters
-- coupled with the agency’s widespread research and staff cuts,
-- have prompted protests from scientists inside and outside HHS plus lawsuits.
Medical experts say Kennedy’s policies are helping “sow distrust in …

A Survey on Proactive Defense Strategies Against Misinformation in Large Language Models
Shuliang Liu, Hongyi Liu, Aiwei Liu, Bingchen Duan, Qi Zheng, Yibo Yan, He Geng, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05288

A Survey on Proactive Defense Strategies Against Misinformation in Large Language Models
The widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) across critical domains has amplified the societal risks posed by algorithmically generated misinformation. Unlike traditional false content, LLM-generated misinformation can be self-reinforcing, highly plausible, and capable of rapid propagation across multiple languages, which traditional detection methods fail to mitigate effectively. This paper introduces a proactive defense paradigm, shifting from passive post hoc detection to antic…

Trump really seems to prefer misinformation to actual facts. Why else would he have abruptly cancelled thousands of research grants (throwing perhaps 10,000 scientists and their families on the streets).
https://www.

Here Are the Nearly 2,500 Medical Research Grants Canceled or Delayed by Trump
Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

140 media organizations call on Israel to LIFT its BAN on international journalists entering Gaza.
There is NO excuse for not allowing international media to enter #Gaza.
"Absolutely unprecedented in modern warfare". #PressFreedom

Press freedom groups demand open access to Gaza – DW – 06/08/2025
More than 140 media organizations are calling on Israel to lift its ban on international journalists entering Gaza. The lack of foreign journalists allows misinformation to flourish, said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists and one of the signatories of the appeal.

Misinformation by Omission: The Need for More Environmental Transparency in AI
Sasha Luccioni, Boris Gamazaychikov, Theo Alves da Costa, Emma Strubell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15572

Misinformation by Omission: The Need for More Environmental Transparency in AI
In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have grown in size and complexity, driving greater demand for computational power and natural resources. In parallel to this trend, transparency around the costs and impacts of these models has decreased, meaning that the users of these technologies have little to no information about their resource demands and subsequent impacts on the environment. Despite this dearth of adequate data, escalating demand for figures quantifying AI's environme…

Mapping the interaction between science and misinformation in COVID-19 tweets
Lucila G. Alvarez-Zuzek, Juan P. Bascur, Anna Bertani, Riccardo Gallotti, Vincent A. Traag
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01481

Mapping the interaction between science and misinformation in COVID-19 tweets
During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific understanding related to the topic evolved rapidly. Along with scientific information being discussed widely, a large circulation of false information, labelled an infodemic by the WHO, emerged. Here, we study the interaction between misinformation and science on Twitter (now X) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We built a comprehensive database of $\sim$407M COVID-19 related tweets and classified the reliability of URLs in the tweets based on Media Bias/Fac…

The #ClimateCrisis is fueled by #disinformation, aka #lies. (And the liars have become more sophisticated since the #TobaccoIndustry

The #ClimateCrisis is fueled by #disinformation, aka #lies. (And the liars have become more sophisticated since the #TobaccoIndustry

White House posts misinformation about In-N-Out menu change (Madeline Wells/SFGATE)
https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/white-house-praises-in-n-out-beef-tallow-20770783.php
http://www.memeorandum.com/250716/p173#a250716p173

Wow, this is a first. A site I actually want to see (archive.ph) is using an IP address on the @… DROP list.
(no, I do NOT think that’s a Spamhaus problem. They are doing their job.) https://

Learn not to be horrified by mere "AI"
Learn to be horrified by inhumanity, oppression, commoditization of labor, deskilling people, disrupting lives, acquiring control of society and culture, of misinformation, of uncaring bullshit.

Stop spreading misinformation about Mastodon users being able to see who visits their profile.
THEY CANNOT.
If you claim they do please provide proof and link to the code.
Here is the code:
github.com/mastodon/mastodon/
If you have proof then open a suggestion like this user here:
https://g…

Do not suggest inactive accounts for following · Issue #34458 · mastodon/mastodon
Pitch There is a feature (it seems that it recently appeared in web timeline) that suggests accounts to follow (similar to https://mastodon.social/explore/suggestions). When I checked some of these...

Me when I spread misinformation on the internet :3c

A Survey on False Information Detection: From A Perspective of Propagation on Social Networks
Kun Xie, Sibo Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18052 https://

A Survey on False Information Detection: From A Perspective of Propagation on Social Networks
The proliferation of false information in the digital age has become a pressing concern, necessitating the development of effective and robust detection methods. This paper offers a comprehensive review of existing false information detection techniques, approached from a novel perspective that emphasizes the propagation characteristics of misinformation. We introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes these methods into homogeneous and heterogeneous propagation-based approaches, providing a deepe…

PhantomHunter: Detecting Unseen Privately-Tuned LLM-Generated Text via Family-Aware Learning
Yuhui Shi, Yehan Yang, Qiang Sheng, Hao Mi, Beizhe Hu, Chaoxi Xu, Juan Cao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15683

PhantomHunter: Detecting Unseen Privately-Tuned LLM-Generated Text via Family-Aware Learning
With the popularity of large language models (LLMs), undesirable societal problems like misinformation production and academic misconduct have been more severe, making LLM-generated text detection now of unprecedented importance. Although existing methods have made remarkable progress, a new challenge posed by text from privately tuned LLMs remains underexplored. Users could easily possess private LLMs by fine-tuning an open-source one with private corpora, resulting in a significant performanc…

Once Champions of Fringe Causes, Now in a ‘Trap of Their Own Making’
Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories.
h…

Law Enforcement Officials Struggle to Fulfill Trump Promises Rooted in Conspiracy Theories
Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Evaluation empirique de la s\'ecurisation et de l'alignement de ChatGPT et Gemini: analyse comparative des vuln\'erabilit\'es par exp\'erimentations de jailbreaks
Rafa\"el Nouailles (GdR)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10029

Evaluation empirique de la sécurisation et de l'alignement de ChatGPT et Gemini: analyse comparative des vulnérabilités par expérimentations de jailbreaks
Large Language models (LLMs) are transforming digital usage, particularly in text generation, image creation, information retrieval and code development. ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November 2022, quickly became a reference, prompting the emergence of competitors such as Google's Gemini. However, these technological advances raise new cybersecurity challenges, including prompt injection attacks, the circumvention of regulatory measures (jailbreaking), the spread of misinformation (hallucinat…

Obviously.
https://newsie.social/@infodocket/114613809101339221

Context, Credibility, and Control: User Reflections on AI Assisted Misinformation Tools
Varun Sangwan, Heidi Makitalo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22940 http…

Context, Credibility, and Control: User Reflections on AI Assisted Misinformation Tools
This paper investigates how collaborative AI systems can enhance user agency in identifying and evaluating misinformation on social media platforms. Traditional methods, such as personal judgment or basic fact-checking, often fall short when faced with emotionally charged or context-deficient content. To address this, we designed and evaluated an interactive interface that integrates collaborative AI features, including real-time explanations, source aggregation, and debate-style interaction. T…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19202 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Towards Generalizable AI-Assisted Misinformation Inoculation: Protecting Confidence Against False Election Narratives
We present a generalizable AI-assisted framework for rapidly generating effective "prebunking" interventions against misinformation. Like mRNA vaccine platforms, our approach uses a stable template structure that can be quickly adapted to counter emerging false narratives. In a preregistered two-wave experiment with 4,293 U.S. registered voters, we test this framework against politically-charged election misinformation -- one of the most challenging domains for misinformation intervention. Our …

Governments Should Mandate Tiered Anonymity on Social-Media Platforms to Counter Deepfakes and LLM-Driven Mass Misinformation
David Khachaturov, Roxanne Schnyder, Robert Mullins
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12814

Governments Should Mandate Tiered Anonymity on Social-Media Platforms to Counter Deepfakes and LLM-Driven Mass Misinformation
This position paper argues that governments should mandate a three-tier anonymity framework on social-media platforms as a reactionary measure prompted by the ease-of-production of deepfakes and large-language-model-driven misinformation. The tiers are determined by a given user's $\textit{reach score}$: Tier 1 permits full pseudonymity for smaller accounts, preserving everyday privacy; Tier 2 requires private legal-identity linkage for accounts with some influence, reinstating real-world accou…

The depth of the damage to the USA by the Republican party and this administration is catastrophic, especially in the long term.
Hundreds or thousands of incredibly damaging actions have been taken this year with seeming dozens more every week.
It is impossible to keep track of the destruction being done to the rule of law, our economy, human rights, our health...

"A Weaponized AI Chatbot Is Flooding Canadian City Councils with Climate Misinformation"
#Canada #Climate #ClimateChange

A Weaponized AI Chatbot Is Flooding Canadian City Councils with Climate Misinformation
Thousands of councillors in more than 500 municipalities have received AI emails from a group called KICLEI, a name that mimics the international network ICLEI.

The Compositional Architecture of Regret in Large Language Models
Xiangxiang Cui, Shu Yang, Tianjin Huang, Wanyu Lin, Lijie Hu, Di Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15617

The Compositional Architecture of Regret in Large Language Models
Regret in Large Language Models refers to their explicit regret expression when presented with evidence contradicting their previously generated misinformation. Studying the regret mechanism is crucial for enhancing model reliability and helps in revealing how cognition is coded in neural networks. To understand this mechanism, we need to first identify regret expressions in model outputs, then analyze their internal representation. This analysis requires examining the model's hidden states, wh…

Google's New AI Tool Generates Convincing Deepfakes of Riots, Conflict, and Election Fraud (Time)
https://time.com/7290050/veo-3-google-misinformation-deepfake/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250603/p107#a250603p107

SHIELD: A Secure and Highly Enhanced Integrated Learning for Robust Deepfake Detection against Adversarial Attacks
Kutub Uddin, Awais Khan, Muhammad Umar Farooq, Khalid Malik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13170

SHIELD: A Secure and Highly Enhanced Integrated Learning for Robust Deepfake Detection against Adversarial Attacks
Audio plays a crucial role in applications like speaker verification, voice-enabled smart devices, and audio conferencing. However, audio manipulations, such as deepfakes, pose significant risks by enabling the spread of misinformation. Our empirical analysis reveals that existing methods for detecting deepfake audio are often vulnerable to anti-forensic (AF) attacks, particularly those attacked using generative adversarial networks. In this article, we propose a novel collaborative learning me…

So far the Social Security agency’s core functions — like sending monthly checks to 74 million Americans — have remained largely intact.
But under pressure from Musk’s team, nearly half of the Social Security Administration’s 140 senior executives, and thousands of employees overall, have taken buyouts or retired.
As many as 12 percent of staff members, out of a bureaucracy that numbered around 57,000 people, are expected to depart their jobs as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting plan.

Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security
The drama offers a case study in how Elon Musk’s team sought to run a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts — and how longtime employees responded.

AI-generated images of fake, otherworldly-looking houseplants are proliferating online and misleading consumers, as AI slop extends to plant care advice (Nicole Froio/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intellige…

AI is ruining houseplant communities online
AI-generated images and chatbot misinformation plague plant collectors.

NewsGuard is retiring "misinformation" and "disinformation" as primary labels, saying the words have become meaningless and politicized (McKenzie Sadeghi/NewsGuard's Reality Check)
https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/commentary-why-were-m…

Commentary: Why We’re Moving Beyond “Misinformation” and “Disinformation”
Welcome to Reality Check, a newsletter that helps you keep track of the false claims and online conspiracy theories that shape our world — and who’s behind them.

WhatsApp Tiplines and Multilingual Claims in the 2021 Indian Assembly Elections
Gautam Kishore Shahi, Scot A. Hale
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16298 https:/…

WhatsApp Tiplines and Multilingual Claims in the 2021 Indian Assembly Elections
WhatsApp tiplines, first launched in 2019 to combat misinformation, enable users to interact with fact-checkers to verify misleading content. This study analyzes 580 unique claims (tips) from 451 users, covering both high-resource languages (English, Hindi) and a low-resource language (Telugu) during the 2021 Indian assembly elections using a mixed-method approach. We categorize the claims into three categories, election, COVID-19, and others, and observe variations across languages. We compare…

excellent analysis of covid state of play
From Julia Doubleday.
"Each time a new wave crops up, the media scrambles to let the public know that COVID is spreading “again” ... But each time, it fails to inform the public that nearly half of COVID cases are asymptomatic, that COVID looks different in different patients, that vaccines do not prevent infections, that rapid tests have high false negative rates, and that COVID is fully airborne.
"Taken together, the virus I’m describing is much more difficult to control than the one the press presents. The press frames the virus as something that can be halted by familiarizing yourself with the symptoms, staying home once you feel sick and test positive, and avoided altogether by simply getting vaccinated or keeping ones’ distance from sick people. ...
"The misinformation that reigns in liberal spaces is not the result of accidental miscommunication. People don’t know that the virus is asymptomatic 40% of the time because there is simply no universe where that virus is controllable without an elimination strategy, or a day-to-day mitigation strategy."
#covid #misinformation #denial #CovidIsAirborne

#podcast recc: Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine? - Pocket Casts https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/febe8

Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine?

CMIE: Combining MLLM Insights with External Evidence for Explainable Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection
Fanxiao Li, Jiaying Wu, Canyuan He, Wei Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23449

CMIE: Combining MLLM Insights with External Evidence for Explainable Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in visual reasoning and text generation. While previous studies have explored the application of MLLM for detecting out-of-context (OOC) misinformation, our empirical analysis reveals two persisting challenges of this paradigm. Evaluating the representative GPT-4o model on direct reasoning and evidence augmented reasoning, results indicate that MLLM struggle to capture the deeper relationships-specifically, cases…

Modeling the Impact of Misinformation Dynamics on Antimicrobial Resistance
Laurance Fakih, Andrei Halanay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21540 https://

Modeling the Impact of Misinformation Dynamics on Antimicrobial Resistance
Antimicrobial Resistance (RAM) poses a significant threat to global public health, making important medicines less useful. While the medical and biological reasons behind RAM are well studied, we still don't know enough about how false health information affects people's actions, which can speed up RAM. This study presents a new mathematical model to investigate the complex interplay between the spread of misinformation and the dynamics of RAM. We adapt a multi-strain fake news model, including…

Describing the email:
“It doesn’t sound like normal government communications, official communications. It sounds like – you know – partisan.”
“It’s disturbing to see Trump hijack a public institution to push blatant misinformation.”
#Sad (a word I heard someone use at various times) - that they have so little honesty and integrity. I

Describing the email:
“It doesn’t sound like normal government communications, official communications. It sounds like – you know – partisan.”
“It’s disturbing to see Trump hijack a public institution to push blatant misinformation.”
#Sad (a word I heard someone use at various times) - that they have so little honesty and integrity. I

From Fragments to Facts: A Curriculum-Driven DPO Approach for Generating Hindi News Veracity Explanations
Pulkit Bansal, Raghvendra Kumar, Shakti Singh, Sriparna Saha, Adam Jatowt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05179

From Fragments to Facts: A Curriculum-Driven DPO Approach for Generating Hindi News Veracity Explanations
In an era of rampant misinformation, generating reliable news explanations is vital, especially for under-represented languages like Hindi. Lacking robust automated tools, Hindi faces challenges in scaling misinformation detection. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework integrating Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with curriculum learning to align machine-generated explanations with human reasoning. Fact-checked explanations from credible sources serve as preferred responses, whil…

Cross-Modal Watermarking for Authentic Audio Recovery and Tamper Localization in Synthesized Audiovisual Forgeries
Minyoung Kim, Sehwan Park, Sungmin Cha, Paul Hongsuck Seo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12723

Cross-Modal Watermarking for Authentic Audio Recovery and Tamper Localization in Synthesized Audiovisual Forgeries
Recent advances in voice cloning and lip synchronization models have enabled Synthesized Audiovisual Forgeries (SAVFs), where both audio and visuals are manipulated to mimic a target speaker. This significantly increases the risk of misinformation by making fake content seem real. To address this issue, existing methods detect or localize manipulations but cannot recover the authentic audio that conveys the semantic content of the message. This limitation reduces their effectiveness in combatin…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11753 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

HintsOfTruth: A Multimodal Checkworthiness Detection Dataset with Real and Synthetic Claims
Misinformation can be countered with fact-checking, but the process is costly and slow. Identifying checkworthy claims is the first step, where automation can help scale fact-checkers' efforts. However, detection methods struggle with content that is (1) multimodal, (2) from diverse domains, and (3) synthetic. We introduce HintsOfTruth, a public dataset for multimodal checkworthiness detection with 27K real-world and synthetic image/claim pairs. The mix of real and synthetic data makes this dat…

Kennedy's new CDC panel includes members who have criticized vaccines and spread misinformation (Mike Stobbe/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/cdc-acip-vaccine-committee-9f58e1f004075b081718ff078de88d76
http://www.memeorandum.com/250611/p173#a250611p173

Text-ADBench: Text Anomaly Detection Benchmark based on LLMs Embedding
Feng Xiao, Jicong Fan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12295 https://

Text-ADBench: Text Anomaly Detection Benchmark based on LLMs Embedding
Text anomaly detection is a critical task in natural language processing (NLP), with applications spanning fraud detection, misinformation identification, spam detection and content moderation, etc. Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs) and anomaly detection algorithms, the absence of standardized and comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating the existing anomaly detection methods on text data limits rigorous comparison and development of innovative approaches. This work pe…

Enkidu: Universal Frequential Perturbation for Real-Time Audio Privacy Protection against Voice Deepfakes
Zhou Feng, Jiahao Chen, Chunyi Zhou, Yuwen Pu, Qingming Li, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12932

Enkidu: Universal Frequential Perturbation for Real-Time Audio Privacy Protection against Voice Deepfakes
The rapid advancement of voice deepfake technologies has raised serious concerns about user audio privacy, as attackers increasingly exploit publicly available voice data to generate convincing fake audio for malicious purposes such as identity theft, financial fraud, and misinformation campaigns. While existing defense methods offer partial protection, they face critical limitations, including weak adaptability to unseen user data, poor scalability to long audio, rigid reliance on white-box kn…

MythTriage: Scalable Detection of Opioid Use Disorder Myths on a Video-Sharing Platform
Hayoung Jung, Shravika Mittal, Ananya Aatreya, Navreet Kaur, Munmun De Choudhury, Tanushree Mitra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00308

MythTriage: Scalable Detection of Opioid Use Disorder Myths on a Video-Sharing Platform
Understanding the prevalence of misinformation in health topics online can inform public health policies and interventions. However, measuring such misinformation at scale remains a challenge, particularly for high-stakes but understudied topics like opioid-use disorder (OUD)--a leading cause of death in the U.S. We present the first large-scale study of OUD-related myths on YouTube, a widely-used platform for health information. With clinical experts, we validate 8 pervasive myths and release …

Synopsis: Secure and private trend inference from encrypted semantic embeddings
Madelyne Xiao, Palak Jain, Micha Gorelick, Sarah Scheffler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23880

Synopsis: Secure and private trend inference from encrypted semantic embeddings
WhatsApp and many other commonly used communication platforms guarantee end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which requires that service providers lack the cryptographic keys to read communications on their own platforms. WhatsApp's privacy-preserving design makes it difficult to study important phenomena like the spread of misinformation or political messaging, as users have a clear expectation and desire for privacy and little incentive to forfeit that privacy in the process of handing over raw data…

"UN rapporteur calls for ban on fossil fuel ads and criminalizing of disinformation"
#UN #UnitedNations #FossilFuels

UN rapporteur calls for ban on fossil fuel ads and criminalizing of disinformation
A United Nations expert is calling for an urgent shift away from fossil fuels by the global economy, including a ban on advertisements or promotions, and the criminalization of misinformation from the industry. Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, who presented her 23-page report at the U.N. Human Rights […]

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23449 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csMM_…

CMIE: Combining MLLM Insights with External Evidence for Explainable Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in visual reasoning and text generation. While previous studies have explored the application of MLLM for detecting out-of-context (OOC) misinformation, our empirical analysis reveals two persisting challenges of this paradigm. Evaluating the representative GPT-4o model on direct reasoning and evidence augmented reasoning, results indicate that MLLM struggle to capture the deeper relationships-specifically, cases…

(1/2) Can you trust what you hear? 🎧 Episode 344 of the EdTech Situation Room (from 15 Jan 2025) explores AI voice tech, misinformation, and media ethics in the digital age.
on Substack:
https://open.substack.com/p…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18148 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

Are We in the AI-Generated Text World Already? Quantifying and Monitoring AIGT on Social Media
Social media platforms are experiencing a growing presence of AI-Generated Texts (AIGTs). However, the misuse of AIGTs could have profound implications for public opinion, such as spreading misinformation and manipulating narratives. Despite its importance, it remains unclear how prevalent AIGTs are on social media. To address this gap, this paper aims to quantify and monitor the AIGTs on online social media platforms. We first collect a dataset (SM-D) with around 2.4M posts from 3 major social…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.SI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.SI/new
[1/1]:
- A Guide to Misinformation Detection Data and Evaluation
Thibault, Tian, Peloquin-Skulski, Curtis, Zhou, Laflamme, Guan, Rabbany, Godbout, Pelrine

AI Feedback Enhances Community-Based Content Moderation through Engagement with Counterarguments
Saeedeh Mohammadi, Taha Yasseri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08110

AI Feedback Enhances Community-Based Content Moderation through Engagement with Counterarguments
Today, social media platforms are significant sources of news and political communication, but their role in spreading misinformation has raised significant concerns. In response, these platforms have implemented various content moderation strategies. One such method, Community Notes on X, relies on crowdsourced fact-checking and has gained traction, though it faces challenges such as partisan bias and delays in verification. This study explores an AI-assisted hybrid moderation framework in whi…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20491 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_…

Examining Algorithmic Curation on Social Media: An Empirical Audit of Reddit's r/popular Feed
Platforms are increasingly relying on algorithms to curate the content within users' social media feeds. However, the growing prominence of proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds has concealed what factors influence the presentation of content on social media feeds and how that presentation affects user behavior. This lack of transparency can be detrimental to users, from reducing users' agency over their content consumption to the propagation of misinformation and toxic content. To uncover…

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine (Helen Lewis/The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/transgender-youth-skrmetti/683350/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250629/p90#a250629p90

Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessment
Tomas Peterka, Matyas Bohacek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09847 https://

Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessment
Out-of-context and misattributed imagery is the leading form of media manipulation in today's misinformation and disinformation landscape. The existing methods attempting to detect this practice often only consider whether the semantics of the imagery corresponds to the text narrative, missing manipulation so long as the depicted objects or scenes somewhat correspond to the narrative at hand. To tackle this, we introduce News Media Provenance Dataset, a dataset of news articles with provenance-…

Identification of Authoritative Nodes and Dismantling of Illicit Networks Using a Novel Metric for Measuring Strength of a Graph
Kartikeya Kansal, Arunabha Sen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12711

Identification of Authoritative Nodes and Dismantling of Illicit Networks Using a Novel Metric for Measuring Strength of a Graph
Dismantling criminal networks or containing epidemics or misinformation through node removal is a well-studied problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of such efforts, one must measure the strength of the network before and after node removal. Process P1 is considered more effective than P2 if the strength of the residual network after removing k nodes via P1 is smaller than that from P2. This leads to the central question: How should network strength be measured? Existing metrics rely solely …

Discovering Coordinated Processes From Social Online Networks
Anna Kalenkova, Lewis Mitchell, Ethan Johnson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12988 https://

Discovering Coordinated Processes From Social Online Networks
The rapid growth of social media presents a unique opportunity to study coordinated agent behavior in an unfiltered environment. Online processes often exhibit complex structures that reflect the nature of the user behavior, whether it is authentic and genuine, or part of a coordinated effort by malicious agents to spread misinformation and disinformation. Detection of AI-generated content can be extremely challenging due to the high quality of large language model-generated text. Therefore, ap…

Deepfakes in Criminal Investigations: Interdisciplinary Research Directions for CMC Research
Lorenz Meinen, Astrid Schom\"acker, Stefanie Wiedemann, Markus Hartmann, Timo Speith, Lena K\"astner, Niklas K\"uhl, Christian R\"uckert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03457

Deepfakes in Criminal Investigations: Interdisciplinary Research Directions for CMC Research
The emergence of deepfake technologies offers both opportunities and significant challenges. While commonly associated with deception, misinformation, and fraud, deepfakes may also enable novel applications in high-stakes contexts such as criminal investigations. However, these applications raise complex technological, ethical, and legal questions. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on computer science, philosophy, and law, to examine what it takes to responsibly use deepfakes in c…

Facts are Harder Than Opinions -- A Multilingual, Comparative Analysis of LLM-Based Fact-Checking Reliability
Lorraine Saju, Arnim Bleier, Jana Lasser, Claudia Wagner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03655

Facts are Harder Than Opinions -- A Multilingual, Comparative Analysis of LLM-Based Fact-Checking Reliability
The proliferation of misinformation necessitates scalable, automated fact-checking solutions. Yet, current benchmarks often overlook multilingual and topical diversity. This paper introduces a novel, dynamically extensible data set that includes 61,514 claims in multiple languages and topics, extending existing datasets up to 2024. Through a comprehensive evaluation of five prominent Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, GPT-3.5 Turbo, LLaMA 3.1, and Mixtral 8x7B, we identify signific…

Addressing overlapping communities in multiple-source detection: An edge clustering approach for complex networks
Haomin Li, Daniel K. Sewell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08265

Addressing overlapping communities in multiple-source detection: An edge clustering approach for complex networks
The source detection problem in network analysis involves identifying the origins of diffusion processes, such as disease outbreaks or misinformation propagation. Traditional methods often focus on single sources, whereas real-world scenarios frequently involve multiple sources, complicating detection efforts. This study addresses the multiple-source detection (MSD) problem by integrating edge clustering algorithms into the community-based label propagation framework, effectively handling mixed…

VaxPulse: Active Global Vaccine Infodemic Risk Assessment
Gerardo Luis Dimaguila (Epidemiology Informatics, Centre for Health Analytics, Melbourne Children's Campus, Australia, Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne, Australia), Muhammad Javed (Epidemiology Informatics, Centre for Health Analytics, Melbourne Children's Campus, Australia, Global Vaccine Data Network, University of Auckland, New Zealand), Jeremiah Munakabayo (Epidemiology Informatics, Centre for H…

VaxPulse: Active Global Vaccine Infodemic Risk Assessment
Vaccine infodemics, driven by misinformation, disinformation, and inauthentic online behaviours, pose significant threats to global public health. This paper presents our response to this challenge, demonstrating how we developed VaxPulse Vaccine Infodemic Risk Assessment Lifecycle (VIRAL), an AI-powered social listening platform designed to monitor and assess vaccine-related infodemic risks. Leveraging interdisciplinary expertise and international collaborations, VaxPulse VIRAL integrates mach…

Measuring the co-evolution of online engagement with (mis)information and its visibility at scale
Yueting Han, Paolo Turrini, Marya Bazzi, Giulia Andrighetto, Eugenia Polizzi, Manlio De Domenico
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06106

Measuring the co-evolution of online engagement with (mis)information and its visibility at scale
Online attention is an increasingly valuable resource in the digital age, with extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic fuelling fierce competition around it. As misinformation pervades online platforms, users seek credible sources, while news outlets compete to attract and retain their attention. Here we measure the co-evolution of online "engagement" with (mis)information and its "visibility", where engagement corresponds to user interactions on social media, and visibility to fluct…

VaxPulse: Monitoring of Online Public Concerns to Enhance Post-licensure Vaccine Surveillance
Muhammad Javed, Sedigh Khademi, Joanne Hickman, Jim Buttery, Hazel Clothier, Gerardo Luis Dimaguila
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04656

VaxPulse: Monitoring of Online Public Concerns to Enhance Post-licensure Vaccine Surveillance
The recent vaccine-related infodemic has amplified public concerns, highlighting the need for proactive misinformation management. We describe how we enhanced the reporting surveillance system of Victoria's vaccine safety service, SAEFVIC, through the incorporation of new information sources for public sentiment analysis, topics of discussion, and hesitancies about vaccinations online. Using VaxPulse, a multi-step framework, we integrate adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) with sentime…