Publications related to The Fake News Vaccine

It’s All Relative: Learning Interpretable Models for Scoring Subjective Bias in Documents from Pairwise Comparisons

Matthias Grossglauser, Aswin Suresh, Chi Hsuan Wu

We propose an interpretable model to score the subjective bias present in documents, based only on their textual content. Our model is trained on pairs of revisions of the same Wikipedia article, where one version is more biased than the other. Although pr ...

2024

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Combating Online Scientific Misinformation

Panagiotis Smeros

The drastic shift towards digital communication in our mediasphere has caused a profound change in the production and consumption of information, which in turn has substantial implications on the social and political landscape. Misinformation, as a side ef ...

EPFL2022

Synthetic Disinformation Attacks on Automated Fact Verification Systems

Antoine Bosselut

Automated fact-checking is a needed technology to curtail the spread of online misinformation. One current framework for such solutions proposes to verify claims by retrieving supporting or refuting evidence from related textual sources. However, the reali ...

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE2022

How Did Europe's Press Cover Covid-19 Vaccination News? A Five-Country Analysis

Daniel Gatica-Perez

Understanding how high-quality newspapers present and discuss major news plays a role towards tackling disinformation, as it contributes to the characterization of the full ecosystem in which information circulates. In this paper, we present an analysis of ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation

Tugrulcan Elmas

In recent years we have seen a marked increase in disinformation including as part of a strategy of so-called hybrid warfare. Adversaries not only directly spread misleading content but manipulate social media by employing sophisticated techniques that exp ...

EPFL2022

Is Your Time Well Spent Online?: Focusing on Quality Experiences Through a User-Centered Recommendation Algorithm and Simulation Model

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Rania Islambouli

Spending an uncontrolled quantity and quality of time on digital news and social media platforms can negatively influence mental health and decrease cognitive abilities. In this paper, we propose a sequential news recommendation system employing deep reinf ...

IEEE2022

On Representation Learning for Scientific News Articles Using Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Angeliki Romanou

In the era of misinformation and information inflation, the credibility assessment of the produced news is of the essence. However, fact-checking can be challenging considering the limited references presented in the news. This challenge can be transcended ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends

Karl Aberer, Tugrulcan Elmas, Ahmed Furkan Ozkalay, Rebekah Jean Overdorf

We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing astroturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and inauthentic activity ...

IEEE2021

SciClops: Detecting and Contextualizing Scientific Claims for Assisting Manual Fact-Checking

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo

This paper describes SciClops, a method to help combat online scientific misinformation. Although automated fact-checking methods have gained significant attention recently, they require pre-existing ground-truth evidence, which, in the scientific context, ...

ACM2021

Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

Bryan Alexander Ford

While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...

University of Chicago Press2021

Using “proof of personhood” to tackle social media risks

Bryan Alexander Ford

The ease of creating fake virtual identities plays an important role in shaping the way information — and misinformation — circulates online. Social media platforms are increasingly prominent in shaping public debates, and the tension between online anonym ...

International Risk Governance Center (IRGC)2021

SciLens News Platform: A System for Real-Time Evaluation of News Articles

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Angeliki Romanou, Carlos Castillo

We demonstrate the SciLens News Platform, a novel system for evaluating the quality of news articles. The SciLens News Platform automatically collects contextual information about news articles in real-time and provides quality indicators about their valid ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Reports of the Workshops Held at the 2020 International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Web and Social Media

Jérémie Rappaz, Panagiotis Smeros

The workshop program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Fourteenth International Conference on Web and Social Media was held June 8 to 20, 2020. The conference venue, which had originally been Atlanta, Georgia, USA, had to ...

AMER ASSOC ARTIFICIAL INTELL2020

Disinformation from the Inside: Combining Machine Learning and Journalism to Investigate Sockpuppet Campaigns

Rebekah Jean Overdorf

This paper brings together machine learning and investigative journalism to examine sockpuppets accounts, a historical breed of fake accounts that are non-automated and human-controlled. Due to their flexible and human-centered nature, sockpuppets pose a c ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Assessing Public Opinion on CRISPR-Cas9: Combining Crowdsourcing and Deep Learning

Marcel Salathé, Martin Mathias Müller, Martin Müller

Background: The discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9-based gene editing method has opened unprecedented new potential for biological and medical engineering, sparking a growing public debate on both the potential and dangers of CRISPR applications. Given the speed ...

JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC2020

Debunking Misinformation on the Web: Detection, Validation, and Visualisation

Thành Tâm Nguyên

Our modern society is struggling with an unprecedented amount of online misinformation, which does harm to democracy, economics, and cybersecurity. Journalism and politics have been impacted by misinformation on a global scale, with weakened public trust i ...

EPFL2019

SciLens: Evaluating the Quality of Scientific News Articles Using Social Media and Scientific Literature Indicators

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo

This paper describes, develops, and validates SciLens, a method to evaluate the quality of scientific news articles. The starting point for our work are structured methodologies that define a series of quality aspects for manually evaluating news. Based on ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

A dashboard for controlling polarization in personalization

Nisheeth Vishnoi, Farnood Salehi, Laura Elisa Celis, Vijay Keswani, Sayash Kapoor

Personalization is pervasive in the online space as it leads to higher efficiency for the user and higher revenue for the platform by individualizing the most relevant content for each user. However, recent studies suggest that such personalization can lea ...

IOS PRESS2019

A Dynamic Embedding Model of the Media Landscape

Karl Aberer, Jérémie Rappaz

Information about world events is disseminated through a wide variety of news channels, each with specific considerations in the choice of their reporting. Although the multiplicity of these outlets should ensure a variety of viewpoints, recent reports sug ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019