NEWSLETTER: Misinformation Review Digest

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Recent Articles

Disagreement as a way to study misinformation and its effects

Damian Hodel and Jevin D. West

Experts consider misinformation a significant societal concern due to its associated problems like political polarization, erosion of trust, and public health challenges. However, these broad effects can occur independently of misinformation, illustrating a misalignment with the narrow focus of the prevailing misinformation concept.

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State media tagging does not affect perceived tweet accuracy: Evidence from a U.S. Twitter experiment in 2022

Claire Betzer, Montgomery Booth, Beatrice Cappio, Alice Cook, Madeline Gochee, Benjamin Grayzel, Leyla Jacoby, Sharanya Majumder, Michael Manda, Jennifer Qian, Mitchell Ransden, Miles Rubens, Mihir Sardesai, Eleanor Sullivan, Harish Tekriwal, Ryan Waaland and Brendan Nyhan

State media outlets spread propaganda disguised as news online, prompting social media platforms to attach state-affiliated media tags to their accounts. Do these tags reduce belief in state media misinformation? Previous studies suggest the tags reduce misperceptions but focus on Russia, and current research does not compare these tags with other interventions.

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How alt-tech users evaluate search engines: Cause-advancing audits

Evan M. Williams and Kathleen M. Carley

Search engine audit studies—where researchers query a set of terms in one or more search engines and analyze the results—have long been instrumental in assessing the relative reliability of search engines. However, on alt-tech platforms, users often conduct a different form of search engine audit.

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Research Note

The origin of public concerns over AI supercharging misinformation in the 2024 U.S. presidential election

Harry Yaojun Yan, Garrett Morrow, Kai-Cheng Yang and John Wihbey

We surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults to understand concerns about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election and public perceptions of AI-driven misinformation. Four out of five respondents expressed some level of worry about AI’s role in election misinformation.

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Google allows advertisers to target the sensitive informational queries of cancer patients

Marco Zenone, Alessandro Marcon, Nora Kenworthy, May van Schalkwyk, Timothy Caulfield, Greg Hartwell and Nason Maani

Alternative cancer treatments are associated with earlier time to death when used without evidence-based treatments. Our study suggests alternative cancer clinics providing scientifically unsupported cancer treatments spent an estimated $15,839,504 on Google ads from 2012 to 2023 targeting users in the United States.

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Structured expert elicitation on disinformation, misinformation, and malign influence: Barriers, strategies, and opportunities

Ariel Kruger, Morgan Saletta, Atif Ahmad and Piers Howe

We used a modified Delphi method to elicit and synthesize experts’ views on disinformation, misinformation, and malign influence (DMMI). In a three-part process, experts first independently generated a range of effective strategies for combatting DMMI, identified the most impactful barriers to combatting DMMI, and proposed areas for future research.

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