More Like this

1. Cross-Platform Disinformation Campaigns: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

   https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-002  

   Wilson, Tom; Starbird, Kate (January 2020, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review)

   We conducted a mixed-method, interpretative analysis of an online, cross-platform disinformation campaign targeting the White Helmets, a rescue group operating in rebel-held areas of Syria that have become the subject of a persistent effort of delegitimization. This research helps to conceptualize what a disinformation campaign is and how it works. Based on what we learned from this case study, we conclude that a comprehensive understanding of disinformation requires accounting for the spread of content across platforms and that social media platforms should increase collaboration to detect and characterize disinformation campaigns. 

   more » « less
2. Mobilizing Manufactured Reality: How Participatory Disinformation Shaped Deep Stories to Catalyze Action during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579616  

   Prochaska, Stephen; Duskin, Kayla; Kharazian, Zarine; Minow, Carly; Blucker, Stephanie; Venuto, Sylvie; West, Jevin D.; Starbird, Kate (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Claims of election fraud throughout the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and during the lead up to the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt have drawn attention to the urgent need to better understand how people interpret and act on disinformation. In this work, we present three primary contributions: (1) a framework for understanding the interaction between participatory disinformation and informal and tactical mobilization; (2) three case studies from the 2020 U.S. election analyzed using detailed temporal, content, and thematic analysis; and (3) a qualitative coding scheme for understanding how digital disinformation functions to mobilize online audiences. We combine resource mobilization theory with previous work examining participatory disinformation campaigns and "deep stories" to show how false or misleading information functioned to mobilize online audiences before, during, and after election day. Our analysis highlights how users on Twitter collaboratively construct and amplify alleged evidence of fraud that is used to facilitate action, both online and off. We find that mobilization is dependent on the selective amplification of false or misleading tweets by influencers, the framing around those claims, as well as the perceived credibility of their source. These processes are a self-reinforcing cycle where audiences collaborate in the construction of a misleading version of reality, which in turn leads to offline actions that are used to further reinforce a manufactured reality. Through this work, we hope to better inform future interventions. 

   more » « less
3. Rules and Rule-Making in the Five Largest Wikipedias

   Hwang, Sohyeon; Shaw, Aaron (August 2022, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media)

   The governance of many online communities relies on rules created by participants. However, prior work provides limited evidence about how these self-governance efforts compare and relate to one another across communities. Studies tend either to analyze communities as discrete entities or consider communities that coexist within a hierarchically-managed platform. In this paper, we investigate both comparative and relational dimensions of self-governance in similar communities. We use exhaustive trace data from the five largest language editions of Wikipedia over almost 20 years since their founding, and consider both patterns in rule-making and overlaps in rule sets. We find similar rule-making activity across the five communities that replicates and extends prior work on English language Wikipedia alone. However, we also find that these Wikipedias have increasingly unique rule sets, even as editing activity concentrates on rules shared between them. Self-governing communities aligned in key ways may share a common core of rules and rule-making practices as they develop and sustain institutional variations. 

   more » « less
4. The Polyvocality of Online COVID-19 Vaccine Narratives that Invoke Medical Racism

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501892  

   Diamond, Lindsay L.; Batan, Hande; Anderson, Jennings; Palen, Leysia (April 2022, ACM CHI 2022)

   Vaccine hesitancy has always been a public health concern, and anti-vaccine campaigns that proliferate disinformation have gained traction across the US in the last 25 years. The demographics of resistance are varied, with health, religious, and, increasingly, political concerns cited as reasons. With the COVID-19 pandemic igniting the fastest development of vaccines to date, mis- and disinformation about them have become inflammatory, with campaigning allegedly including racial targeting. Through a primarily qualitative investigation, this study inductively examines a large online vaccine discussion space that invokes references to the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study to understand how tactics of racial targeting of Black Americans might appear publicly. We find that such targeting is entangled with a genuine discussion about medical racism and vaccine hesitancy. Across 12 distinct voices that address race, medical racism, and vaccines, we discuss how mis- and disinformation sit alongside accurate information in a “polyvocal” space. 

   more » « less
5. Understanding the Use of Fauxtography on Social Media

   Wang, Yuping; Tahmasbi, Fatemeh; Blackburn, Jeremy; Bradlyn, Barry; De Cristofaro, Emiliano; Magerman, David; Zannettou, Savvas; Stringhini, Gianluca (June 2021, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media)

   Budak, Ceren; Cha, Meeyoung; Quercia, Daniele; Xie, Lexing (Ed.)

   Despite the influence that image-based communication has on online discourse, the role played by images in disinformation is still not well understood. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of fauxtography, analyzing the use of manipulated or misleading images in news discussion on online communities. First, we develop a computational pipeline geared to detect fauxtography, and identify over 61k instances of fauxtography discussed on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit. Then, we study how posting fauxtography affects engagement of posts on social media, finding that posts containing it receive more interactions in the form of re-shares, likes, and comments. Finally, we show that fauxtography images are often turned into memes by Web communities. Our findings show that effective mitigation against disinformation need to take images into account, and highlight a number of challenges in dealing with image-based disinformation. 

   more » « less