Spread Of Disinformation Research Articles

Enhancing authenticity and trust in social media: an automated approach for detecting fake profiles

<p class="Abstract">Fake profile detection on social media is a critical task intended for detecting and alleviating the existence of deceptive or fraudulent user profiles. These fake profiles, frequently generated with malicious intent, could engage in different forms of spreading disinformation, online fraud, or spamming. A range of techniques is employed to solve these problems such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and behavioural analysis, to examine engagement patterns, user-generated content, and profile characteristics. This paper proposes an automated fake profile detection using the coyote optimization algorithm with deep learning (FPD-COADL) method on social media. This multifaceted approach scrutinizes user-generated content, engagement patterns, and profile attributes to differentiate genuine user accounts from deceptive ones, ultimately reinforcing the authenticity and trustworthiness of social networking platforms. The presented FPD-COADL method uses robust data pre-processing methods to enhance the uniformness and quality of data. Besides, the FPD-COADL method applies deep belief network (DBN) for the recognition and classification of fake accounts. Extensive experiments and evaluations on own collected social media datasets underscore the effectiveness of the approach, showcasing its potential to identify fake profiles with high scalability and precision.</p>

Media literacy as a means of protecting Uzbekistan's media environment from disinformation

The article is devoted to the study of the concept of “disinformation” in the media environment of Uzbekistan, as well as technologies of their detection and effective counteraction. The author considers media literacy as the main means of counteracting disinformation. This paper considers modern types of disinformation in social networks disseminated with destructive use of automated systems based on AI (artificial intelligence). Measures of effective counteraction to the spread of disinformation, including through increasing media literacy of the population and increasing the number and quality of fact-checking platforms in Uzbekistan are studied. The paper uses the method of comparative analysis of scientific research in the field of creation and dissemination of disinformation, which allows identifying best practices to improve the basic skills of their detection. The set of research tools also includes a survey by questionnaire method realized by the author in 2023 among 1066 respondents - citizens of Uzbekistan. The hypothesis of the paper is that the success of the process of identifying fakes and disinformation is directly dependent on the level of media literacy of the population. Increasing the level of media literacy of the population, in turn, should be carried out through the development and widespread implementation of mechanisms for detecting disinformation on the basis of medialiteracy and various fact-checking platforms - which will be the recommended outcome of the work. In the course of the study, we will provide arguments in favor of these arguments.

“News Desertification” in Europe: Highlighting Correlations for Future Research

The Local Media for Democracy (LM4D) project is the first project that explores news deserts in Europe comprehensively. Its final report highlighted challenges and opportunities for local and community media and identified the level of risk of news deserts in the 27 European Union (EU) Member States. As a pilot project, however, its results are still preliminary and open to evaluation, and, thus, they require further discussion and corroboration. Drawing from these results, and applying a multidisciplinary approach, we extrapolated research directions for the study of news deserts in the EU. By cross-analyzing data from the LM4D dataset with other datasets, we provide a preliminary analysis of three promising lines of research: (1) the relationship between public service media quality and news deserts, (2) news deserts and the spread of disinformation, and (3) social media usage and news desertification. We conclude by pointing out the limitations of this preliminary analysis and opportunities for further research on news deserts in the EU.

Analyzing Russia’s propaganda tactics on Twitter using mixed methods network analysis and natural language processing: a case study of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine

This paper examines Russia’s propaganda discourse on Twitter during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The study employs network analysis, natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and qualitative analysis to identify key communities and narratives associated with the prevalent and damaging narrative of “fascism/Nazism” in discussions related to the invasion. The paper implements a methodological pipeline to identify the main topics, and influential actors, as well as to examine the most impactful messages in spreading this disinformation narrative. Overall, this research contributes to the understanding of propaganda dissemination on social media platforms and provides insights into the narratives and communities involved in spreading disinformation during the invasion.

Automatic Content Analysis Systems: Detecting Disinformation in Social Networks

In the 21st century, the rapid rise of disinformation and propaganda has become a significant global issue, undermining democratic processes and socio-political institutions. Disinformation, defined as intentionally false or misleading information, aims to manipulate public opinion and cause economic harm. This paper explores the use of computational linguistics and machine learning methods to detect disinformation. Techniques such as text preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification algorithms (e.g., SVM, naive Bayes) are adapted for identifying fake news. Recent studies demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in social media and news platforms, highlighting the importance of advanced models like GPT-4 in improving detection accuracy and combating the spread of disinformation.

Botlitica: A generative AI-based tool to assist journalists in navigating political propaganda campaigns

The hype on generative AI has raised concerns about the spread of disinformation but also opened up new opportunities for hybrid journalism. The proliferation of political propaganda campaigns spread across digital media during election periods constitutes a challenge for journalists who struggle to exercise information gatekeeping. AI-based tools can in principle help, but journalists are resistant to using them since they are sceptical about their compliance with news values and their scarce user-friendliness. To cope with such issues, we present Botlitica, a GPT3-based chatbot able to answer users’ questions according to the information shared on different social media by a given political party which is, thus, embodied by the AI agent in the conversation. The back-end and front-design of the chatbot are devised to privilege transparency. We report the results of a preliminary evaluation of Botlitica which show that the tool fastens journalists’ capabilities to navigate propaganda campaigns inducing them to exercise critical thinking.

The Impact of Biases on Health Disinformation Research

This work analyses the treatment of elements such as biases and their relationship with disinformation in international academic production. The first step in this process was to carry out a search for papers published in academic journals indexed in the main indexing platforms. This was followed by a bibliometric analysis involving an analysis of the production and impact of the selected publications, using social media techniques and a semantic content analysis based on abstracts. The data obtained from Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions, relating to health, biases, and fake news as well as post-truth, show how these works have multiplied in the last decade. The question relating to this research is as follows: How have cognitive biases been treated in national and international academic journals? This question is answered with respect to the scientific or research method. The results, which date from 2000 to 2024, show a considerable academic dedication to exploring the relationship between biases and health disinformation. In all these communities we have observed a relationship between production with the field of medicine as a general theme and social media. Furthermore, this connection is always tied to other subjects, such as an aversion to vaccines in Community 10; disinformation about COVID-19 on social media in Community 5; COVID-19 and conspiracy theories in Community 6; and content for the dissemination of health-related subjects on YouTube and the disinformation spread about them. The community analysis carried out shows a common factor in all the analysed communities—that of cognitive bias.

Social Media in the Management of Obesity and Diabetes: An Underutilised Population Educational Tool.

Obesity and diabetes are two of the most common chronic medical conditions encountered, putting an ever-increasing strain on healthcare systems worldwide. Social media meanwhile has taken the world by storm over the last 2 decades, providing a way to distribute information instantly and on a vast scale at the click of a button. The use of social media to aid in the management of obesity and diabetes though is an underutilised tool, with the potential to help in educating and supporting these patients in numerous ways both now and in the future, on a grand scale. The caveat to this, however, is the negative side of social media, which can include the spread of disinformation and bullying. In this commentary, we discuss the methodology and wide scale of positive and negative effects of social media across the management of obesity and diabetes, as well as the possible methods we can use this to our advantage in the medical profession to help our patients going forward.

Widespread Misperceptions Among U.S. Adults About Tobacco Company Engagement in Black and African American Communities.

Menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars (MC/FC) bring profits to U.S. tobacco companies at the cost of Black/African American (B/AA) lives. This exploratory cross-sectional study describes perceptions of tobacco company engagement and activities in B/AA communities related to MC/FC. Among 2307 U.S. adults aged 18-45 surveyed in 2022, six items addressed beliefs about tobacco company funding of B/AA community organizations, payment of B/AA lobbyists to oppose public health policies, support of health equity efforts in B/AA communities, and targeted marketing of MC/FC in B/AA communities. Adjusted proportions were calculated for each belief overall and by race and cigarette smoking status. Among all adults, 37% believed that tobacco companies deny the harms of MC/FCs, 20% believed they pay Black lobbyists to oppose health policies, and 12% believed they fund Black community organizations. Compared with non-B/AA adults, a higher proportion of B/AA adults believed that tobacco companies target Black communities with MC/FC marketing (62% vs. 46%). More adult smokers (ie, menthol or non-MC) than nonsmokers thought that tobacco companies support health equity efforts and did not target Black communities with MC/FC marketing nor deny the harms of MC/FCs to B/AA communities. Few B/AAs and adult smokers believed that tobacco companies used B/AA organizations and lobbyists to oppose MC/FC policies in the B/AA community as well as reject MC/FC's harmfulness. Culturally tailored and community-engaged communication efforts are needed to correct disinformation about MC/FC tobacco companies' engagement and activities in B/AA communities among B/AA and menthol cigarette smokers. Tobacco companies have a history of predatory marketing that promotes flavored tobacco products to Black/African American (B/AA) individuals and more recently has spread disinformation to dissuade policy support for menthol cigarette/flavored cigar (MC/FC) bans. It is unclear what are the perceptions of tobacco company engagement and activities in B/AA communities related to MC/FC. Our study shows that B/AA adults and current cigarette smokers hold misperceptions about tobacco companies' role in spreading disinformation about MC/FC. This study identified beliefs about the industry's role in funding B/AA organizations and lobbyists who oppose policy, as well as the industry's denial of menthol cigarette and flavored cigar harms as potential messaging targets for communication efforts designed to correct disinformation about MC/FC policies among B/AA and those who currently smoke MC.

Disinformation As A Contemporary Security Threat: A Literature Review

Disinformation has become a threat to public security and order. Disinformation is a strategy to obscure information by spreading information that is deliberately false and false. Whatever the purpose of disinformation, the public will be the victims. Given its status as a threat, it requires appropriate policing measures to prevent the spread of disinformation. To counter disinformation, it is necessary to develop strategies by empowering communities to counteract disinformation when it occurs. By using the literature review method, this research will show some community empowerment policies that can be done to prevent the spread of disinformation.

Unveiling the truth: A systematic review of fact-checking and fake news research in social sciences

The current media ecosystem, marked by immediacy and social networks dynamics, has created a fertile field for disinformation. Faced with its exponential growth, since 2014, research has focused on combating false content in the media. From a descriptive approach, this study has analyzed 200 documents on fact-checking and fake news published between 2014 and 2022 in scientific journals indexed in Scopus. This study has found that Europe and the United States are leading the way in the number of journals and authors publishing on the subject. The United States universities are the ones that host the most significant number of authors working on fact-checking, while the methodologies used, mostly <i>ad hoc</i> due to the novelty of the topic, allow to reflect on the need to promote work focused on the design, testing, and evaluation of prototypes or real experiences within the field. The most common contributions analyzed include typologies of false content and media manipulation mechanisms, models for evaluating and detecting disinformation, proposals to combat false content and strengthen verification mechanisms, studies on the role of social media in the spread of disinformation, efforts to develop media literacy among the public and journalists, case studies of fact-checkers, identification of factors that influence the belief in fake news, and analysis of the relationship between disinformation, verification, politics, and democracy. It is concluded that it is essential to develop research that connects the academy with the industry to raise awareness of the need to address these issues among the different actors in the media scenario.

Persuading others in different communication media: appeals to logic, authority and emotion

PurposeScholars of persuasion have long made a distinction between appeals to logic, emotion and authority- logos, ethos and pathos- but ideas developed to account for live face-to-face conversation processes must also be tested in new media. We aimed to test the effectiveness of these three strategies in one-to-one chats through different communication media.Design/methodology/approachWith a 3 × 3 × 2 between-subject factorial design, we tested these three strategies in one-to-one chats (female–female or male–male pairs) through three communication media: face-to-face, Skype video or Skype text. The persuasion scenario was adapted from prior studies in which students were presented with the idea of requiring a comprehensive exam as part of their degree. The participants were all undergraduate students of a major university in USA.FindingsOur results showed trivial differences between female–female and male–male conditions. The logos appeal worked best overall in persuading the participants to change their reported attitudes. Additionally, the explanations provided by the participants for their own opinions were most like the persuasion scripts in the logos condition compared to the other two appeal conditions. Separately, participants indicated some disapproval of the pathos appeal in the text-based chat condition, although this did not seem to make a difference in terms of actual attitude change.Research limitations/implicationsOne major limitation of our study is that our subjects are college students and therefore are not representative of Internet users in general. Future research should test these three types of persuasion strategies on people of diverse backgrounds. For example, while logos seems to be most effective strategy in persuading college students (at least in our study), pathos or ethos may be more effective when one attempts to persuade people of different backgrounds.Practical implicationsAlthough it is enough for a statistical test, our sample size is still relatively small due to constraints on time, personnel and funding. We also recognize that it is challenging both conceptually and empirically to compare the effectiveness of three persuasion strategies separately.Social implicationsOur findings suggest it is helpful to use fact-checking tools to combat disinformation in cases where users may not have sufficient domain knowledge or may not realize the need to identify or examine the given information. Additionally, it may require more effort to negate the impact of the disinformation spread than correcting the information, as some users may not only believe false information but also may start to reason in ways similar to those presented in the disinformation messages.Originality/valuePast studies on online persuasion have limitedly examined whether and how communication media and persuasion strategies interact in one-to-one persuasion sessions. Our experiment makes an attempt to close this gap by examining the persuasion process and outcome in three different communication media and with three different persuasion strategies.

Disinformation As A Threat To Society And Efforts To Eliminate Them

With the development of a wide range of modern technologies, the rapid spread and wide availability of the Internet, as well as the extensive use of various information and communication tools and devices, a new range of possibilities have emerged for people, such as information retrieval, processing, and dissemination. However, at the same time, a new range of opportunities has emerged for the spread of misleading, deceptive and false information – disinformation –spread by state and non-state actors with the aim of influencing the functioning of democratic society and people's behaviour. The spread of disinformation thus currently represents an extremely dangerous threat that can have very negative consequences for individuals, organisations, and the entire society. For this reason, as part of the conducted security research, the author of this paper, deals with the issue of disinformation, points out the danger of its spread, defines the concept of disinformation and at the same time, discusses the possibilities of eliminating the consequences of the spread of disinformation.

Disinformation As Part Of Hybrid Threats – Czech-Slovak View

The paper presents a comparative analysis of research on the issue of disinformation among students of two educational institutions in České Budějovice and Bratislava, namely the College of European and Regional Studies (CZ) and the Academy of the Police Force in Bratislava (SK). The research focuses on the comparison of attitudes, abilities, and awareness of disinformation among students from both institutions within their respective educational environments. The data were collected through questionnaire surveys and analysis of specific situations related to disinformation are relevant to security study programmes. Based on the partial results obtained through the questionnaire survey, three key findings emerged. The first finding indicates that almost all respondents confirm having experienced encounters with disinformation. The second finding points to the relatively low ability of the respondents to competently identify disinformation, with only 7.42 % of VŠERS students and 7.91 % of APZ students demonstrating this skill. The third crucial finding suggests that the training of security experts in both institutions needs to be changed and improved, as only 23.44 % of VŠERS students and 25.32 % of APZ students declare being sufficiently informed about the disinformation issue. These findings emphasize the need to upgrade the educational programs and highlight the challenge of increasing students´ awareness and skills related to combating disinformation. This research provides valuable insights for the educational programmes of both institutions and may serve as support for further development of teaching methodologies aimed at enhancing students' abilities to identify and handle the issues concerning spreading disinformation in society.

Online disinformation in the 2020 U.S. election: swing vs. safe states

For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state’s presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual margin of victory. Therefore, election campaigns are especially intense in states where there is no clear direction on which party will be the winning party. These states are often referred to as swing states. To measure the impact of such an election law on the campaigns, we analyze the Twitter activity surrounding the 2020 US preelection debate, with a particular focus on the spread of disinformation. We find that about 88% of the online traffic was associated with swing states. In addition, the sharing of links to unreliable news sources is significantly more prevalent in tweets associated with swing states: in this case, untrustworthy tweets are predominantly generated by automated accounts. Furthermore, we observe that the debate is mostly led by two main communities, one with a predominantly Republican affiliation and the other with accounts of different political orientations. Most of the disinformation comes from the former.

TraceEvader: Making DeepFakes More Untraceable via Evading the Forgery Model Attribution

In recent few years, DeepFakes are posing serve threats and concerns to both individuals and celebrities, as realistic DeepFakes facilitate the spread of disinformation. Model attribution techniques aim at attributing the adopted forgery models of DeepFakes for provenance purposes and providing explainable results to DeepFake forensics. However, the existing model attribution techniques rely on the trace left in the DeepFake creation, which can become futile if such traces were disrupted. Motivated by our observation that certain traces served for model attribution appeared in both the high-frequency and low-frequency domains and play a divergent role in model attribution. In this work, for the first time, we propose a novel training-free evasion attack, TraceEvader, in the most practical non-box setting. Specifically, TraceEvader injects a universal imitated traces learned from wild DeepFakes into the high-frequency component and introduces adversarial blur into the domain of the low-frequency component, where the added distortion confuses the extraction of certain traces for model attribution. The comprehensive evaluation on 4 state-of-the-art (SOTA) model attribution techniques and fake images generated by 8 generative models including generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models (DMs) demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Overall, our TraceEvader achieves the highest average attack success rate of 79% and is robust against image transformations and dedicated denoising techniques as well where the average attack success rate is still around 75%. Our TraceEvader confirms the limitations of current model attribution techniques and calls the attention of DeepFake researchers and practitioners for more robust-purpose model attribution techniques.

Особливості національної безпеки України в період воєнного стану: цілі, виклики та стратегія

This scientific article is devoted to the improvement of public administration in the sphere of national security of Ukraine, the corresponding goals, challenges and strategy. The essence of the concept of "national security", its components and influencing factors, as well as the concept of "system of ensuring national security" are systematically analyzed. An analysis of such a strategic document as the National Security Strategy of Ukraine adopted by the Decision of the National Security and Defense Council dated September 14, 2020 and introduced by the Decree of the President of Ukraine dated September 14, 2020, including the intended goals of ensuring national security, was carried out. The article also highlights the challenges that faced the system of state management of national security of Ukraine at the beginning of Russia's military aggression in 2014, but remain relevant today. In general, this article is important for understanding and improving the system of state management of national security of Ukraine in the conditions of modern global challenges and threats. The security and defense sector was analyzed, including the role of the Security Service of Ukraine in the field of security and defense. Today, some legislative acts do not fully correspond to the current security situation in Ukraine. The National Security Council must constantly update the national security strategy, the set of measures to ensure it, as well as constantly create conditions for increasing the effectiveness of the organizational and legal support of the entire national security and defense system. In this way, it will make it possible to protect the state sovereignty, territorial integrity and national interests of Ukraine, in conditions of war. Every manifestation of Russian aggression makes it obvious that its goal is not just the seizure of Ukrainian territories, but the destruction of national identity and the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Russia officially denies the existence of Ukrainians as a separate nation. At the same time, at the beginning of the invasion, the Kremlin made a bet not only on the army, but also on the intelligence and subversive activities of its special services and sabotage and terrorist work, cyber attacks and the spread of disinformation.

Inducement of Desired Behavior via Soft Policies

Terms like inducement, incentivization, persuasion, and to some extent enticement, are used in our daily lives to describe situations where one individual (decision maker, or entity) acts in a way to influence the decision-making process of another individual or individuals, where the outcome could benefit all involved or only the one who has initiated the process. Such influence could be exerted in two different ways (though variations do exist): via a direct input by the influencer into the utility or reward (or loss) of the receiving party, or by controlling (and possibly crafting) the information flow to the latter, in an attempt to shape beliefs at the receiving end (as in spread of disinformation). Both scenarios (and those that fall in between) could be analyzed within a dynamic Stackelberg game-theoretic framework, with a precise notion of equilibrium, which this paper addresses. The focus will naturally be on soft inducement (incentivization, persuasion) policies, rather than hard enforcement (such as threat) ones which are not that interesting or practical. This overview paper introduces some explicit models that lead to appealing such policies. It also includes a discussion on the impact of various factors, such as population size and uncertainty in modeling, on the resulting equilibria, and identify several challenges that lie ahead.

Ghanaian Journalists and The Spread of Rumors During the Covid19 Pandemic: Views from Five Regions

This qualitative study examines the role of Ghanaian journalists in disseminating rumors, misinformation, and disinformation during the Covid19 pandemic. Additionally, the study investigates how this information was transmitted and spread among journalists, as well as the motivating factors behind their actions. The participants in the study were purposely selected from five administrative regions of Ghana that had a lower uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, as classified by the Ghana Health Services. The findings of the study indicate that journalists played a significant role in spreading disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana. The interviewees in this study attributed this to various reasons, such as parochial and partisan interests, lack of information, deliberate attempts to force verification, and pressure associated with the job. The study concludes that the involvement of journalists in the spread of rumors about the COVID-19 pandemic and related issues can be attributed to the liberalized nature of the media space in Ghana with its excessive commercialization and rush for breaking news. This competition for news has led many journalists to neglect due diligence and professional ethics in sourcing and disseminating information to the public. This study highlights the need for policymakers to establish effective measures for regulating the ethics and standards of journalism in line with the relevant constitutional provisions and democratic practice

Reverse-Engineering of Disinformation Campaigns During the War in Ukraine

Information operations have long been a part of warfare. Disinformation campaigns, in particular, are usually launched by states in order to mislead and confuse populations in adversarial countries, but also to obtain support for their actions from domestic audiences. These campaigns threaten human security, at the individual level, but also state- and even international security. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia came with a new wave of disinformation not only in Ukraine itself, but also in countries from various other continents. This paper studies the characteristics of the spread of disinformation from the first day of the war in February 2022 through July 2023. The data we used in this study came from the EUvsDisinfo project, established by the European Union’s East StratCom Task Force in 2015. In particular, we included variables about the topic of these articles containing disinformation, the specific target audience, and origin of the source disseminating the disinformation. The results indicate that the articles concerned predominantly security-focused topics, and to a lesser extent economic and cultural issues. Interestingly, the target audience for the disinformation articles focused predominantly on non-EU/NATO audiences – they overwhelmingly targeted Russian-speaking populations, but also Arab-speaking and Armenian-speaking populations. The majority of the articles were also from Russian sources. The results also provided other additional insights into the characteristics of disinformation during the war which are discussed in the paper as well. Based our findings, we provide policy recommendations for protection against disinformation campaigns for both EU/NATO-members and countries which were affected by these campaigns but are not members of either of these organizations.