Tootfinder

Empty rhetoric, weasel words, paltering, and unverified claims: the bullshit index of AI. Read on here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-misinformation-llm-bullshit

AI Misinformation: The Bullshit Index Explained
Can AI models be trusted? Discover how a "bullshit index" measures their indifference to truth and what it means for users.

"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.

Trump's answer to numbers he doesn't like: Change them or throw them away (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/14/trump-data-misinformation/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzU1MTQ0MDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzU2NTI2Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NTUxNDQwMDAsImp0aSI6Ijk5NmY5MTRiLTVkN2EtNGJmMS1iMzY5LTQwOTJjYWY4NTljYSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9wb2xpdGljcy8yMDI1LzA4LzE0L3RydW1wLWRhdGEtbWlzaW5mb3JtYXRpb24vIn0.TcNvHiGgi4lHtEbtNmQWn8bKCVtXtg-a0vmfEoRQWW4&itid=gfta
http://www.memeorandum.com/250814/p77#a250814p77

https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinformation-charlie-kirk

Fabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media
Mahmoud Fawzi, Bj\"orn Ross, Walid Magdy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07845 h…

Fabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media
Misinformation is a growing concern in a decade involving critical global events. While social media regulation is mainly dedicated towards the detection and prevention of fake news and political misinformation, there is limited research about religious misinformation which has only been addressed through qualitative approaches. In this work, we study the spread of fabricated quotes (Hadith) that are claimed to belong to Prophet Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) as a case study demonstrating one …

Public support for misinformation interventions depends on perceived fairness, effectiveness, and intrusiveness
Catherine King, Samantha C. Phillips, Kathleen M. Carley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05849

Public support for misinformation interventions depends on perceived fairness, effectiveness, and intrusiveness
The proliferation of misinformation on social media has concerning possible consequences, such as the degradation of democratic norms. While recent research on countering misinformation has largely focused on analyzing the effectiveness of interventions, the factors associated with public support for these interventions have received little attention. We asked 1,010 American social media users to rate their support for and perceptions of ten misinformation interventions implemented by the gover…

The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation (Elizabeth Lopatto/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinformation-charlie-kirk
http://www.memeorandum.com/250912/p140#a250912p140

CDC shooter blamed COVID vaccine for depression; union demands statement against misinformation
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2025/08/cdc-shooter-blamed-covid-vaccine-for-depression-union-demands-statement-against-misinformation/

OpenFake: An Open Dataset and Platform Toward Large-Scale Deepfake Detection
Victor Livernoche, Akshatha Arodi, Andreea Musulan, Zachary Yang, Adam Salvail, Ga\'etan Marceau Caron, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Godbout, Reihaneh Rabbany
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09495

OpenFake: An Open Dataset and Platform Toward Large-Scale Deepfake Detection
Deepfakes, synthetic media created using advanced AI techniques, have intensified the spread of misinformation, particularly in politically sensitive contexts. Existing deepfake detection datasets are often limited, relying on outdated generation methods, low realism, or single-face imagery, restricting the effectiveness for general synthetic image detection. By analyzing social media posts, we identify multiple modalities through which deepfakes propagate misinformation. Furthermore, our human…

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

The Perils of Chart Deception: How Misleading Visualizations Affect Vision-Language Models
Ridwan Mahbub, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mizanur Rahman, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Enamul Hoque
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09716

The Perils of Chart Deception: How Misleading Visualizations Affect Vision-Language Models
Information visualizations are powerful tools that help users quickly identify patterns, trends, and outliers, facilitating informed decision-making. However, when visualizations incorporate deceptive design elements-such as truncated or inverted axes, unjustified 3D effects, or violations of best practices-they can mislead viewers and distort understanding, spreading misinformation. While some deceptive tactics are obvious, others subtly manipulate perception while maintaining a facade of legi…

yimbys keep calling it misinformation that #SB79 allows demolition of rent-controlled duplexes and telling others to read the bill. it's right here, plain as day!

Never Compromise to Vulnerabilities: A Comprehensive Survey on AI Governance
Yuchu Jiang, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Tianle Zhang, Yao Huang, Yanghao Zhang, Yan Wang, Yanshu Li, Xizhong Guo, Yusheng Zhao, Jun Zhang, Zhi Zhang, Xiaojian Lin, Yixiu Zou, Haoxuan Ma, Yuhu Shang, Yuzhi Hu, Keshu Cai, Ruochen Zhang, Boyuan Chen, Yilan Gao, Ziheng Jiao, Yi Qin, Shuangjun Du, Xiao Tong, Zhekun Liu, Yu Chen, Xuankun Rong, Rui Wang, Yejie Zheng, Zhaoxin Fan, Hongyuan Zhang, Pan Zhou, Lei Jin, Hao Z…

Never Compromise to Vulnerabilities: A Comprehensive Survey on AI Governance
The rapid advancement of AI has expanded its capabilities across domains, yet introduced critical technical vulnerabilities, such as algorithmic bias and adversarial sensitivity, that pose significant societal risks, including misinformation, inequity, security breaches, physical harm, and eroded public trust. These challenges highlight the urgent need for robust AI governance. We propose a comprehensive framework integrating technical and societal dimensions, structured around three interconne…

“In an era of online misinformation, declining trust and paywalled services, the [Australian Dictionary of Biography] keeps fact-based, scholarly information in the public domain. Its continued high quality and availability supports our shared mission of making knowledge freely and reliably accessible to all. #Wikimedia #Australia

Why the Australian Dictionary of Biography matters to Wikimedians (and the world)
The ADB powers Wikipedia and protects our past

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…

A Georgia man who had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal
has been identified as the shooterwho opened fire late Friday on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, killing a police officer.
The 30-year-old suspect, who died during the incident,
had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire.
The man, identified a…

Union wants statement against COVID vaccine misinformation after CDC shooting
A Georgia man who had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal has been identified as the shooter who opened fire late Friday on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, killing a police officer. The 30-year-old suspect, who died during the incident, had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire, a law enforcement official told The Associat…

Toward Verifiable Misinformation Detection: A Multi-Tool LLM Agent Framework
Zikun Cui, Tianyi Huang, Chia-En Chiang, Cuiqianhe Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03092 https://

Toward Verifiable Misinformation Detection: A Multi-Tool LLM Agent Framework
With the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs), the detection of misinformation has become increasingly important and complex. This research proposes an innovative verifiable misinformation detection LLM agent that goes beyond traditional true/false binary judgments. The agent actively verifies claims through dynamic interaction with diverse web sources, assesses information source credibility, synthesizes evidence, and provides a complete verifiable reasoning process. Our designed agen…

A New Dataset and Benchmark for Grounding Multimodal Misinformation
Bingjian Yang, Danni Xu, Kaipeng Niu, Wenxuan Liu, Zheng Wang, Mohan Kankanhalli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08008

A New Dataset and Benchmark for Grounding Multimodal Misinformation
The proliferation of online misinformation videos poses serious societal risks. Current datasets and detection methods primarily target binary classification or single-modality localization based on post-processed data, lacking the interpretability needed to counter persuasive misinformation. In this paper, we introduce the task of Grounding Multimodal Misinformation (GroundMM), which verifies multimodal content and localizes misleading segments across modalities. We present the first real-worl…

Fact-Checking at Scale: Multimodal AI for Authenticity and Context Verification in Online Media
Van-Hoang Phan, Tung-Duong Le-Duc, Long-Khanh Pham, Anh-Thu Le, Quynh-Huong Dinh-Nguyen, Dang-Quan Vo, Hoang-Quoc Nguyen-Son, Anh-Duy Tran, Dang Vu, Minh-Son Dao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08592

Fact-Checking at Scale: Multimodal AI for Authenticity and Context Verification in Online Media
The proliferation of multimedia content on social media platforms has dramatically transformed how information is consumed and disseminated. While this shift enables real-time coverage of global events, it also facilitates the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, especially during crises such as wars, natural disasters, or elections. The rise of synthetic media and the reuse of authentic content in misleading contexts have intensified the need for robust multimedia verification to…

An interesting read...
https://theconversation.com/from-printing-presses-to-facebook-feeds-what-yesterdays-witch-hunts-have-in-common-with-todays-misinformation-crisis-260995

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.

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

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…

It's been about three weeks, but Metacurity's digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush is back!
This issue's selection covers
--Russian cybersecurity companies are tools for global expansion,
--Merrick Garland's fears of a judicial system cyberattack came true,
--Flock has plans for ubiquitous surveillance to stop crime,
--Misinformation from adversaries now runs ram…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 8/16/25, 8/23/25, and 8/30/25
Russian cybersecurity companies are tools for global expansion, Merrick Garland's fears of a judicial system cyberattack came true, Flock has plans for ubiquitous surveillance to stop crime, Misinformation from adversaries now runs rampant with no US pushback, AI can't capture personality, more

Reform UK councillor in Burnley accused of ‘whipping up misinformation’
https://northwestbylines.co.uk/politic

Reform UK councillor in Burnley accused of ‘whipping up misinformation’
Rumours of migrant housing resulted in an arson attack in Burnley, the council fights back online

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

"Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/19/climate-misinformation-turning-crisis-into-catastrophe-ipie-report?

Scientists slam Trump regime climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/01/trump-epa-climate-change-report

Variety Is the Spice of Life: Detecting Misinformation with Dynamic Environmental Representations
Bing Wang, Ximing Li, Yiming Wang, Changchun Li, Jiaxu Cui, Renchu Guan, Bo Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03420

Variety Is the Spice of Life: Detecting Misinformation with Dynamic Environmental Representations
The proliferation of misinformation across diverse social media platforms has drawn significant attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its detrimental effects. Accordingly, automatically distinguishing misinformation, dubbed as Misinformation Detection (MD), has become an increasingly active research topic. The mainstream methods formulate MD as a static learning paradigm, which learns the mapping between the content, links, and propagation of news articles and the corre…

US steps back from joint efforts to combat misinformation, FT reports: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/09/us-steps-back-from-joint.html

Fact2Fiction: Targeted Poisoning Attack to Agentic Fact-checking System
Haorui He, Yupeng Li, Bin Benjamin Zhu, Dacheng Wen, Reynold Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06059

Fact2Fiction: Targeted Poisoning Attack to Agentic Fact-checking System
State-of-the-art fact-checking systems combat misinformation at scale by employing autonomous LLM-based agents to decompose complex claims into smaller sub-claims, verify each sub-claim individually, and aggregate the partial results to produce verdicts with justifications (explanatory rationales for the verdicts). The security of these systems is crucial, as compromised fact-checkers, which tend to be easily underexplored, can amplify misinformation. This work introduces Fact2Fiction, the firs…

Measuring Epistemic Humility in Multimodal Large Language Models
Bingkui Tong, Jiaer Xia, Sifeng Shang, Kaiyang Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09658 https://

Measuring Epistemic Humility in Multimodal Large Language Models
Hallucinations in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) -- where the model generates content inconsistent with the input image -- pose significant risks in real-world applications, from misinformation in visual question answering to unsafe errors in decision-making. Existing benchmarks primarily test recognition accuracy, i.e., evaluating whether models can select the correct answer among distractors. This overlooks an equally critical capability for trustworthy AI: recognizing when none of …

"Joe Rogan claims study shows Earth cooling – but report’s authors say he’s wrong"
#Climate #ClimateChange

Experts call on US Health Secretary RFK Jr to resign over misinformation | Health News | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/4/experts-call-on-us-health-secretary-rfk-jr-to-resign-over-misinformation?traffic_source=rss

"“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…

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…

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…

Careful Queries, Credible Results: Teaching RAG Models Advanced Web Search Tools with Reinforcement Learning
Yuqin Dai, Shuo Yang, Guoqing Wang, Yong Deng, Zhanwei Zhang, Jun Yin, Pengyu Zeng, Zhenzhe Ying, Changhua Meng, Can Yi, Yuchen Zhou, Weiqiang Wang, Shuai Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07956…

Careful Queries, Credible Results: Teaching RAG Models Advanced Web Search Tools with Reinforcement Learning
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating up-to-date external knowledge, yet real-world web environments present unique challenges. These limitations manifest as two key challenges: pervasive misinformation in the web environment, which introduces unreliable or misleading content that can degrade retrieval accuracy, and the underutilization of web tools, which, if effectively employed, could enhance query precision and help mitigate this noise, ul…

All of us can remember at least some part of ourselves from when we were younger. Within most of us there exists a child with ideals for a good world, untainted by our politics' need for violence and its justifications carried through every layer of society, from education to the media.
Over the years that child is killed, bombarded with misinformation, shot with exaggeration, buried in fear about why certain groups of people who could be their friends or neighbours, are actually rapi…

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…

China's new AI content labeling law goes into effect, as part of a broad effort to address AI-related risks such as misinformation and copyright infringement (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3

China’s social media sites rush to abide by AI-generated content labelling law
The law requires explicit and implicit labels for AI-generated text, images, audio, video and other virtual content.

CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs' Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checking
Ruiling Guo, Xinwei Yang, Chen Huang, Tong Zhang, Yong Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03957

CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs' Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checking
The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) to fact-check misinformation remains uncertain, despite their growing use. To this end, we present CANDY, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in fact-checking Chinese misinformation. Specifically, we curate a carefully annotated dataset of ~20k instances. Our analysis shows that current LLMs exhibit limitations in generating accurate fact-checking conclusions, even when enhanced with chain-of-…

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. Giovanna Monti and Lucian Precup shared their insights from their work developing an AI-driven platform integrating search capabilities, an intelligent assistant and a RAG system.
Watch the full session: #bbuzz returns on 7-9 June 2026: https://tickets.plainschwarz.com/bbuzz26/c/8Hvk0ZvJA/

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.

Mining the Social Fabric: Unveiling Communities for Fake News Detection in Short Videos
Haisong Gong, Bolan Su, Xinrong Zhang, Jing Li, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07992

Mining the Social Fabric: Unveiling Communities for Fake News Detection in Short Videos
Short video platforms have become a major medium for information sharing, but their rapid content generation and algorithmic amplification also enable the widespread dissemination of fake news. Detecting misinformation in short videos is challenging due to their multi-modal nature and the limited context of individual videos. While recent methods focus on analyzing content signals-visual, textual, and audio-they often overlook implicit relationships among videos, uploaders, and events. To addre…

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

TRUST-VL: An Explainable News Assistant for General Multimodal Misinformation Detection
Zehong Yan, Peng Qi, Wynne Hsu, Mong Li Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04448 https://

TRUST-VL: An Explainable News Assistant for General Multimodal Misinformation Detection
Multimodal misinformation, encompassing textual, visual, and cross-modal distortions, poses an increasing societal threat that is amplified by generative AI. Existing methods typically focus on a single type of distortion and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios. In this work, we observe that different distortion types share common reasoning capabilities while also requiring task-specific skills. We hypothesize that joint training across distortion types facilitates knowledge sharing and …

CDC shooter blamed COVID vaccine for depression; union demands statement against misinformation (Susan Haigh/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/cdc-suspect-covid-vaccine-georgia-officer-dead-0c6018d2f7caf7a2702bc09f9f3568ba
http://www.memeorandum.com/250811/p2#a250811p2

A researcher found 88 TikTok accounts that used AI-generated versions of Jorge Ramos and other Spanish-language journalists to spread misinformation for profit (Nicole Acevedo/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/fake-ai-vide…

What's behind the TikTok accounts using AI-generated versions of real Latino journalists?
The accounts point to the challenge of stopping or controlling the surge in fake images and misinformation targeting Spanish-speakers in the U.S., as AI technology advances.

Safeguarding Patient Trust in the Age of AI: Tackling Health Misinformation with Explainable AI
Sueun Hong, Shuojie Fu, Ovidiu Serban, Brianna Bao, James Kinross, Francesa Toni, Guy Martin, Uddhav Vaghela
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04052

Safeguarding Patient Trust in the Age of AI: Tackling Health Misinformation with Explainable AI
AI-generated health misinformation poses unprecedented threats to patient safety and healthcare system trust globally. This white paper presents an explainable AI framework developed through the EPSRC INDICATE project to combat medical misinformation while enhancing evidence-based healthcare delivery. Our systematic review of 17 studies reveals the urgent need for transparent AI systems in healthcare. The proposed solution demonstrates 95% recall in clinical evidence retrieval and integrates no…

Agent-Based Exploration of Recommendation Systems in Misinformation Propagation
Lise Jakobsen, Anna Johanne Holden, \"Onder G\"urcan, \"Ozlem \"Ozg\"obek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21724

Agent-Based Exploration of Recommendation Systems in Misinformation Propagation
This study uses agent-based modeling to examine the impact of various recommendation algorithms on the propagation of misinformation on online social networks. We simulate a synthetic environment consisting of heterogeneous agents, including regular users, bots, and influencers, interacting through a social network with recommendation systems. We evaluate four recommendation strategies: popularity-based, collaborative filtering, and content-based filtering, along with a random baseline. Our res…

"The cost of net-zero: Brits starting to believe misinformation, survey finds"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #NetZero #Climate

Network Prebunking Problem: Optimizing Prebunking Targets to Suppress the Spread of Misinformation in Social Networks
Satoshi Furutani, Toshiki Shibahara, Mitsuaki Akiyama, Masaki Aida
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01124

Network Prebunking Problem: Optimizing Prebunking Targets to Suppress the Spread of Misinformation in Social Networks
As a countermeasure against misinformation that undermines the healthy use of social media, a preventive intervention known as prebunking has recently attracted attention in the field of psychology. Prebunking aims to strengthen individuals' cognitive resistance to misinformation by presenting weakened doses of misinformation or by teaching common manipulation techniques before they encounter actual misinformation. Despite the growing body of evidence supporting its effectiveness in reducing su…

"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…

Adversarial Attacks Against Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey
Fanzhen Liu, Alsharif Abuadbba, Kristen Moore, Surya Nepal, Cecile Paris, Jia Wu, Jian Yang, Quan Z. Sheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08463

Adversarial Attacks Against Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey
In an era where misinformation spreads freely, fact-checking (FC) plays a crucial role in verifying claims and promoting reliable information. While automated fact-checking (AFC) has advanced significantly, existing systems remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that manipulate or generate claims, evidence, or claim-evidence pairs. These attacks can distort the truth, mislead decision-makers, and ultimately undermine the reliability of FC models. Despite growing research interest in adversari…

Another case of death by alternative medicine. Anyone who recommends the Gerson method should be in the dock, IMO.
https://

My sister died after refusing cancer treatment. Now I want to get justice for her – and hold my mum to account
Gabriel Shemirani blames his mother’s conspiracy theories for the death of his twin Paloma at age 23. As the inquest nears a verdict, he talks to Marianna Spring about his campaign against health misinformation

Surviving the Narrative Collapse: Sustainability and Justice in Computing Within Limits
Dave Guruge, Samuel Mann, Ruth Myers, Oliver Bates, Mikey Goldweber, Andy Williamson, Jon Lasenby, Ian Brooks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05992

Surviving the Narrative Collapse: Sustainability and Justice in Computing Within Limits
Sustainability-driven computing research - encompassing equity, diversity, climate change, and social justice - is increasingly dismissed as woke or even dangerous in many sociopolitical contexts. As misinformation, ideological polarisation, deliberate ignorance and reactionary narratives gain ground, how can sustainability research in computing continue to exist and make an impact? This paper explores these tensions through Fictomorphosis, a creative story retelling method that reframes contes…

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.

Skeptik: A Hybrid Framework for Combating Potential Misinformation in Journalism
Arlen Fan, Fan Lei, Steven R. Corman, Ross Maciejewski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18499 https://…

Skeptik: A Hybrid Framework for Combating Potential Misinformation in Journalism
The proliferation of misinformation in journalism, often stemming from flawed reasoning and logical fallacies, poses significant challenges to public understanding and trust in news media. Traditional fact-checking methods, while valuable, are insufficient for detecting the subtle logical inconsistencies that can mislead readers within seemingly factual content. To address this gap, we introduce Skeptik, a hybrid framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with heuristic approaches t…

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

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

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…

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.

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.MM. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.MM/new
[1/1]:
- A New Dataset and Benchmark for Grounding Multimodal Misinformation
Bingjian Yang, Danni Xu, Kaipeng Niu, Wenxuan Liu, Zheng Wang, Mohan Kankanhalli

Yours or Mine? Overwriting Attacks against Neural Audio Watermarking
Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Shengyao Wang, Junpei Xue, Hanqing Guo, Jiang Liu, Phone Lin, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05835

Yours or Mine? Overwriting Attacks against Neural Audio Watermarking
As generative audio models are rapidly evolving, AI-generated audios increasingly raise concerns about copyright infringement and misinformation spread. Audio watermarking, as a proactive defense, can embed secret messages into audio for copyright protection and source verification. However, current neural audio watermarking methods focus primarily on the imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking, while ignoring its vulnerability to security attacks. In this paper, we develop a simple yet…

A top official at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
demanded the removal of YouTube videos of himself
that were published by a physician and writer who has been critical of medical misinformation and public health officials in the Trump administration.
Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist in New York City,
received an email from YouTube on Friday night, which stated that
Vinay Prasad, who is the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, had demanded the remov…

"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 […]

Quantifying Conversation Drift in MCP via Latent Polytope
Haoran Shi, Hongwei Yao, Shuo Shao, Shaopeng Jiao, Ziqi Peng, Zhan Qin, Cong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06418 http…

Quantifying Conversation Drift in MCP via Latent Polytope
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external tools, enabling dynamic aggregation of real-time data to improve task execution. However, its non-isolated execution context introduces critical security and privacy risks. In particular, adversarially crafted content can induce tool poisoning or indirect prompt injection, leading to conversation hijacking, misinformation propagation, or data exfiltration. Existing defenses, such as rule-based filters…

Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory (Marc Hudson/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/why-wind-farms-attract-so-much-misinformation-and-conspiracy-theory/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250823/p29#a250823p29

Scaling Truth: The Confidence Paradox in AI Fact-Checking
Ihsan A. Qazi, Zohaib Khan, Abdullah Ghani, Agha A. Raza, Zafar A. Qazi, Wassay Sajjad, Ayesha Ali, Asher Javaid, Muhammad Abdullah Sohail, Abdul H. Azeemi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08803

Scaling Truth: The Confidence Paradox in AI Fact-Checking
The rise of misinformation underscores the need for scalable and reliable fact-checking solutions. Large language models (LLMs) hold promise in automating fact verification, yet their effectiveness across global contexts remains uncertain. We systematically evaluate nine established LLMs across multiple categories (open/closed-source, multiple sizes, diverse architectures, reasoning-based) using 5,000 claims previously assessed by 174 professional fact-checking organizations across 47 languages…

China's new AI content labeling law goes into effect, as part of a broad effort to address AI-related risks such as misinformation and copyright infringement (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3

China’s social media sites rush to abide by AI-generated content labelling law
The law requires explicit and implicit labels for AI-generated text, images, audio, video and other virtual content.

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

MisVisFix: An Interactive Dashboard for Detecting, Explaining, and Correcting Misleading Visualizations using Large Language Models
Amit Kumar Das, Klaus Mueller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04679

MisVisFix: An Interactive Dashboard for Detecting, Explaining, and Correcting Misleading Visualizations using Large Language Models
Misleading visualizations pose a significant challenge to accurate data interpretation. While recent research has explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for detecting such misinformation, practical tools that also support explanation and correction remain limited. We present MisVisFix, an interactive dashboard that leverages both Claude and GPT models to support the full workflow of detecting, explaining, and correcting misleading visualizations. MisVisFix correctly identifies 96% of …

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

"Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory"
#WindTurbines #Energy #Renewables

Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory
Opposition is often rooted in a worldview in crisis.

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…

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.

OSINT or BULLSHINT? Exploring Open-Source Intelligence tweets about the Russo-Ukrainian War
Johannes Niu, Mila Stillman, Anna Kruspe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03599 https://

OSINT or BULLSHINT? Exploring Open-Source Intelligence tweets about the Russo-Ukrainian War
This paper examines the role of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) on Twitter regarding the Russo-Ukrainian war, distinguishing between genuine OSINT and deceptive misinformation efforts, termed "BULLSHINT." Utilizing a dataset spanning from January 2022 to July 2023, we analyze nearly 2 million tweets from approximately 1,040 users involved in discussing real-time military engagements, strategic analyses, and misinformation related to the conflict. Using sentiment analysis, partisanship detectio…

E-CaTCH: Event-Centric Cross-Modal Attention with Temporal Consistency and Class-Imbalance Handling for Misinformation Detection
Ahmad Mousavi, Yeganeh Abdollahinejad, Roberto Corizzo, Nathalie Japkowicz, Zois Boukouvalas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11197

E-CaTCH: Event-Centric Cross-Modal Attention with Temporal Consistency and Class-Imbalance Handling for Misinformation Detection
Detecting multimodal misinformation on social media remains challenging due to inconsistencies between modalities, changes in temporal patterns, and substantial class imbalance. Many existing methods treat posts independently and fail to capture the event-level structure that connects them across time and modality. We propose E-CaTCH, an interpretable and scalable framework for robustly detecting misinformation. If needed, E-CaTCH clusters posts into pseudo-events based on textual similarity an…

Evaluating the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Adversarial Evidence in the Health Domain
Shakiba Amirshahi, Amin Bigdeli, Charles L. A. Clarke, Amira Ghenai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03787

Evaluating the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Adversarial Evidence in the Health Domain
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems provide a method for factually grounding the responses of a Large Language Model (LLM) by providing retrieved evidence, or context, as support. Guided by this context, RAG systems can reduce hallucinations and expand the ability of LLMs to accurately answer questions outside the scope of their training data. Unfortunately, this design introduces a critical vulnerability: LLMs may absorb and reproduce misinformation present in retrieved evidence. This…

"Hot air and hard truths: Study finds climate disinformation evolves beyond denial to target credibility"
#Climate #ClimateChange

Hot air and hard truths: Study finds climate disinformation evolves beyond denial to target credibility
The Information Policy and Integrity Exchange (IPIE) has released a landmark review on climate misinformation and disinformation, synthesizing a decade of research across 300 studies. The review reveals a troubling evolution in climate disinformation tactics.

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

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, …

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 …

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…

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,…

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…

LLM-based Contrastive Self-Supervised AMR Learning with Masked Graph Autoencoders for Fake News Detection
Shubham Gupta, Shraban Kumar Chatterjee, Suman Kundu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18819

LLM-based Contrastive Self-Supervised AMR Learning with Masked Graph Autoencoders for Fake News Detection
The proliferation of misinformation in the digital age has led to significant societal challenges. Existing approaches often struggle with capturing long-range dependencies, complex semantic relations, and the social dynamics influencing news dissemination. Furthermore, these methods require extensive labelled datasets, making their deployment resource-intensive. In this study, we propose a novel self-supervised misinformation detection framework that integrates both complex semantic relations …

DiFaR: Enhancing Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Diverse, Factual, and Relevant Rationales
Herun Wan, Jiaying Wu, Minnan Luo, Xiangzheng Kong, Zihan Ma, Zhi Zeng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10444

DiFaR: Enhancing Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Diverse, Factual, and Relevant Rationales
Generating textual rationales from large vision-language models (LVLMs) to support trainable multimodal misinformation detectors has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by three core challenges: (i) insufficient diversity in generated rationales, (ii) factual inaccuracies due to hallucinations, and (iii) irrelevant or conflicting content that introduces noise. We introduce DiFaR, a detector-agnostic framework that produces diverse, factual, and r…

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…

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…

CleanNews: a Network-aware Fake News Mitigation Architecture for Social Media
Maria-Diana Cotelin, Ciprian-Octavian Truic\u{a}, Elena-Simona Apostol
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04489

CleanNews: a Network-aware Fake News Mitigation Architecture for Social Media
With the widespread use of the internet and handheld devices, social media now holds a power similar to that of old newspapers. People use social media platforms for quick and accessible information. However, this convenience comes with a variety of risks. Anyone can freely post content, true or false, with the probability of remaining online forever. This makes it crucial to identify and tackle misinformation and disinformation on online platforms. In this article, we propose CleanNews, a comp…

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…

Is this chart lying to me? Automating the detection of misleading visualizations
Jonathan Tonglet, Jan Zimny, Tinne Tuytelaars, Iryna Gurevych
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21675 h…

Is this chart lying to me? Automating the detection of misleading visualizations
Misleading visualizations are a potent driver of misinformation on social media and the web. By violating chart design principles, they distort data and lead readers to draw inaccurate conclusions. Prior work has shown that both humans and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are frequently deceived by such visualizations. Automatically detecting misleading visualizations and identifying the specific design rules they violate could help protect readers and reduce the spread of misinformatio…

Gravity Well Echo Chamber Modeling With An LLM-Based Confirmation Bias Model
Joseph Jackson, Georgiy Lapin, Jeremy E. Thompson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03832 https://

Gravity Well Echo Chamber Modeling With An LLM-Based Confirmation Bias Model
Social media echo chambers play a central role in the spread of misinformation, yet existing models often overlook the influence of individual confirmation bias. An existing model of echo chambers is the "gravity well" model, which creates an analog between echo chambers and spatial gravity wells. We extend this established model by introducing a dynamic confirmation bias variable that adjusts the strength of pull based on a user's susceptibility to belief-reinforcing content. This variable is …

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…