Tootfinder

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."

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.

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://

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

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

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."

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

AI cannot fact check
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250602-hey-chatbot-is-this-true-ai-factchecks-sow-misinformation

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

"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.

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.

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

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…

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 …

Me when I spread misinformation on the internet :3c

(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/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…

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

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

Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation
Federal agencies say that by axing the funding they are protecting the First Amendment. Critics see it as stifling scientific inquiry into sources of harmful online content.

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…

Mal dormir accroit le risque d'accepter des récits complotistes.
https://theconversation.com/how-poor-sleep-could-fuel-belief-in-conspiracy-theories-251669

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…

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…

XMAD-Bench: Cross-Domain Multilingual Audio Deepfake Benchmark
Ioan-Paul Ciobanu, Andrei-Iulian Hiji, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Paul Irofti, Cristian Rusu, Radu Tudor Ionescu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00462

XMAD-Bench: Cross-Domain Multilingual Audio Deepfake Benchmark
Recent advances in audio generation led to an increasing number of deepfakes, making the general public more vulnerable to financial scams, identity theft, and misinformation. Audio deepfake detectors promise to alleviate this issue, with many recent studies reporting accuracy rates close to 99%. However, these methods are typically tested in an in-domain setup, where the deepfake samples from the training and test sets are produced by the same generative models. To this end, we introduce XMAD-…

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…

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:

Silence is Golden: Leveraging Adversarial Examples to Nullify Audio Control in LDM-based Talking-Head Generation
Yuan Gan, Jiaxu Miao, Yunze Wang, Yi Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01591

Silence is Golden: Leveraging Adversarial Examples to Nullify Audio Control in LDM-based Talking-Head Generation
Advances in talking-head animation based on Latent Diffusion Models (LDM) enable the creation of highly realistic, synchronized videos. These fabricated videos are indistinguishable from real ones, increasing the risk of potential misuse for scams, political manipulation, and misinformation. Hence, addressing these ethical concerns has become a pressing issue in AI security. Recent proactive defense studies focused on countering LDM-based models by adding perturbations to portraits. However, th…

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…

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…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19064 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSI_…

The Stepwise Deception: Simulating the Evolution from True News to Fake News with LLM Agents
With the growing spread of misinformation online, understanding how true news evolves into fake news has become crucial for early detection and prevention. However, previous research has often assumed fake news inherently exists rather than exploring its gradual formation. To address this gap, we propose FUSE (Fake news evolUtion Simulation framEwork), a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based simulation approach explicitly focusing on fake news evolution from real news. Our framework model a so…

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…

I saw some posts todat about #euos #linux
It is rather scary, how misinformation about its relation to EU was copy pasted by ppl. Like really, how could you have not checked the most intriguing part of the news, before sharing it.

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